“We are all dying of life.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“Perhaps—the insight came suddenly—perhaps love existed in its truest, deepest form when one partner saw into the soul of the other and never shrank from what was discovered there.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“This country’s drifting into serious trouble because of the clamor for simple and immediate solutions to complex problems that will take years to solve—even with total effort on both sides.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“The race is to the driven, not the swift.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“crossroads about the same time tomorrow. Ashton spent a few moments chattering about her excuse for being away from Mont Royal; it also involved staying with a friend, a nonexistent one. Madeline heard Ashton’s voice, but few of the words registered. The three women crowded into the chaise, Ashton in the middle. It was evident to Madeline that Orry’s sister didn’t like squeezing against a Negress, but she’d just have to put up with it.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
John Jakes
Born place: in Chicago, The United States
Born date March 31, 1932
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“The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discolouring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“Only the strongest are put through the fire,' Josiah said. 'And the forge creates things of great strength and beauty.'
'Then I shall be truly glorious by the time my tenure ends.”
― Sharon Shinn, quote from Archangel
“From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.)
Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“The day before, they had started eating the saltwater-damaged bread. The bread, which they had carefully dried in the sun, now contained all the salt of seawater but not, of course, the water. Already severely dehydrated, the men were, in effect, pouring gasoline on the fire of their thirsts—forcing their kidneys to extract additional fluid from their bodies to excrete the salt. They were beginning to suffer from a condition known as hypernatremia, in which an excessive amount of sodium can bring on convulsions.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
“They gave no alms; in their view charity simply demoralized people. If you worked as hard as they did then you would earn as much too: it was open to everyone to do so, and if you didn’t know how to get on in life that was your own fault.”
― Władysław Szpilman, quote from The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45
Great House
Creed
The Rotters' Club
The Runaway Queen
The Hen Who Dreamed...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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