Lloyd Alexander · 1104 pages
Rating: (5.5K votes)
“I’ve heard men complain of doing woman’s work, and women complain of doing man’s work,” she added, fastening her bony thumb and forefinger on Gurgi’s ear and marching him to a stool beside Taran, “but I’ve never heard the work complain of who did it, so long as it got done!”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Chronicles of Prydain Boxed Set
“Adaon smiled gravely. “Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty, too.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Chronicles of Prydain Boxed Set
“often the trouble with magical things. They’re never quite what you’d expect.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Chronicles of Prydain Boxed Set
“There are those,” he said gently, “who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot know. If you are, take heart nonetheless. Those who reach the end do more than gain wisdom. As rough wool becomes cloth, and crude clay a vessel, so do they change and fashion wisdom for others, and what they give back is greater than what they won.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Chronicles of Prydain Boxed Set
“man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone. Once,” he added, “you told me that the seeking counts more than the finding. So, too, must the striving count more than the gain.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Chronicles of Prydain Boxed Set
“True kinship has naught to do with blood ties, however strong they be. I think we are all kin, brothers and sisters one to the other, all children of all parents.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Chronicles of Prydain Boxed Set
“Stale water is a poor drink,” said Annlaw. “Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Chronicles of Prydain Boxed Set
Lloyd Alexander
Born place: in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The United States
Born date January 30, 1924
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“Sometimes you know when someone is telling you the truth.”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead
“Some people make a bad bed, they just have to lie in it.”
― Virginia Euwer Wolff, quote from Make Lemonade
“If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist, it is because I want to laugh more. I don't say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That's why it doesn't matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Tropic of Capricorn
“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.
People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]
“His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from His Last Bow
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