“It was funny, though, the things you didn't learn about people until after they died.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
“But adulthood," continued the barely twentysomething, "doesn't give you power over what matters most. It doesn't protect you from pain, loss, fate. That's part of being human.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
“Men suck.
- Not all men. Just the really good ones.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
“Besides, humans aren't prey. They are our natural enemies. They are to be avoided. ”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
“In the end, I'd loved him enough to let go. From afar, I would love him forever.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
“Turned out there was some big, bad Wolf in my good boy after all.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
“She seems to think being cryptic is some kind of substitute for having a decent personality.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
“There’s always music,” he replied, “if you listen carefully enough.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, quote from Tantalize
Cynthia Leitich Smith
Born place: Kansas City, The United States
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“The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...”
― Christopher Isherwood, quote from Goodbye to Berlin
“Can they love without a word for it?”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from Dying of the Light
“How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from Berenice
“Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from Freddy and Fredericka
“The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”
― Henry James, quote from The Bostonians
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Heart and SoulBookQuoters 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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