“She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences.”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“There's plenty of stories that need telling what never get told, just because people can't bear the listening.”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“Still, it's an interesting technique--leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And *in* someone else.”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“No, since we began this case, another possibility has presented itself to me--the thought that, although my mother cared for her children, their welfare was simply not her first priority. And the real question is not why that should have been so, but why it should have been such a difficult theory to either formulate or accept--why, indeed, it should have taken a murder case to make me think of it. After all, a man who makes his children of secondary or even minor importance, though he may be criticized by some, is hardly held to be unusual. Why should we believe any differently of a woman?”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“there’s plenty of stories that need telling what never get told, just because people can’t bear the listening. My”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“Whatever poor team of maidservants had to stuff her into the kind of tight-waisted gown she was wearing that evening earned their pay as sure as any coal miner, that much was certain. The”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“It isn’t really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn’t want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society—more important, even, than honest or decent—is identifiable. Even when Libby’s evil—perhaps most of all when she’s evil—she’s easy to categorize, to stick to a board with a pin like some scientific specimen. Those men in Stillwater are terrified of her because being terrified lets them know who she is—it keeps them safe. Imagine how much harder it would be to say, yes, she’s a woman capable of terrible anger and violence, but she’s also someone who’s tried desperately to be a nurturer, to be a good and constructive human being. If you accept all that, if you allow that inside she’s not just one or the other, but both, what does that say about all the other women in town? How will you ever be able to tell what’s actually going on in their hearts—and heads? Life in the simple village would suddenly become immensely complicated. And so, to keep that from happening, they separate things. The normal, ordinary woman is defined as nurturing and loving, docile and compliant. Any female who defies that categorization must be so completely evil that she’s got to be feared, feared even more than the average criminal—she’s got to be invested with the powers of the Devil himself. A witch, they probably would have called her in the old days. Because she’s not just breaking the law, she’s defying the order of things.”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness
“She died a few days later, and her death buried once and for all the intrigues between the Precious Wife, the Gracious Wife, and all the Imperial favorites. Rivalries and alliances, loathing and attraction had been dissolved. Their existence had been a pointless tragedy, just as the talent of one prodigious poetess had been.”
― Shan Sa, quote from Empress
“Keep your head high. Ain’t nothing to look at on the ground,”
― Rachel Van Dyken, quote from Elite
“She took a deep breath and let herself become someone else. An imitation of herself who was calm, even in a situation like this.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from The Emperor's Soul
“A silhouette was striding down the center of the road, heading for the alley we’d just vacated. Lean, tall, a long black coat rippling behind him, he was instantly recognizable. Even from this distance, I could see the glow of his sword, blue-black and deadly, and the glint of a cold silver eye.”
― Julie Kagawa, quote from The Iron Traitor
“a walther ppk. you're a james bond fan, i imagine....”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
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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