“There are times when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Ye'll learn more of a man if ye look at his face when he's looking at somebody else, than ye'll learn any other way, but,' he advised her, 'ye have to keep silent to do it”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“But what you bring back with you in the end, he said, might not be what you started out in search of to begin with”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Hiding the person you are,' he said, 'won't make you happy. I never hide who I am. What I am.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“The strongest soldier cannot balance long upon the blade that does divide his honor and his heart, and whatever way he falls, the cut will kill him.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“The world becomes a wider place, with but a little learning.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“We rarely see the things we don’t expect to see.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Because it is in giving of ourselves and our possessions that we best please God; by actions, not words. And all men do deserve a chance to earn God's grace.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“The firebird drops a feather, was his summary, and if you're fool enough to pick it up and chase the bird itself, you're in for trouble.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“She nodded, looking down at the small wooden bird, a plain thing carved by a great man who'd always taken pleasure in creating things with his own hands. She's telling me, I think, that I should seek to be none other than myself, and so fly always like the bird that I was born to be.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“We cannot know a man's nature when all does go well with him, but when those people he thinks will assist him oppose him instead, then we know, for a man has the patience and humility that he shows then, and no more.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Some things weren’t meant to live in cages.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Tis the curse of a woman of influence that she must always be reckoned unvirtuous.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“into the air. There was love here—not perfect, but strong,”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“There are times,” he said to Anna, “when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“My love, cease thy weeping, now listen to me, For waking and sleeping, my heart is with thee; Love, let nothing grieve thee, and do not complain, For I never will leave thee, while life doth remain.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Now do that with your thoughts as well, pluck out the needless vanities and worries, and you’ll find you grow the straighter for it.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Edmund had obviously never yet experienced the speed with which news traveled round the docklands. “Is there anyone who does not know him?” “All”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“And does he like blondes, as well?'
Rob laughed. I had forgotten just how great a laugh he had. 'No, he prefers, dark haired women. You've nothing to fear from the Sentinel, Nicola.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“Remember the faith you were raised in my child, and love not in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth; and whoever may come to you, either a friend or a foe, or a thief or a robber, receive them with kindness, for each man must walk on the path to which he has been called.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Firebird
“You know it’s going to be a bad day when you can’t get privacy inside your own head.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from Magic Lost, Trouble Found
“I began to sense that I would be a stranger in society for the rest of my life, and the desire was born in me to lead my life outside this society.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Peter Camenzind
“There was something demoniacal and insuperable about typographical errors, as if they were part of the natural evil that permeated man's existence, as if they had a life of their own and were determined to manifest themselves no matter what, as surely as weeds in the best-tended gardens.”
― Patricia Highsmith, quote from Deep Water
“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.
But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.
My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.”
― Matt Ridley, quote from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
“The spirit of hate, the anti-Christ, is contention, strife, fault-finding, lovers of self, lovers of praise. Those are the anti-Christ, and take possession of groups, masses, and show themselves even in the lives of men.30”
― David Wilcock, quote from The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies
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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