“Learn humility, while there's yet time--': those were the last of the abbot's words he had waited to hear. All very well, he thought, to be humble in accepting one's own pain and deprivation, perhaps, but what right have I, what right has he, to make a virtue of meekness when it will be Adam who suffers? I call that cheap humility.”
― Edith Pargeter, quote from The Heaven Tree Trilogy
“Should I come to you, Father, with anything that made me ashamed? What do I matter? What's honour to me? My honour is to keep her from harm and from grief. I have no other; I want none.”
― Edith Pargeter, quote from The Heaven Tree Trilogy
“Love with her would be a field of action, not a need. She was complete whether she won or lost the world. She was her own fortress and her own sanctuary.”
― Edith Pargeter, quote from The Heaven Tree Trilogy
“The dispensations of God are always just,' he said. 'We get the sons we deserve.”
― Edith Pargeter, quote from The Heaven Tree Trilogy
“Have you no errand I can do for you in hell?' he said. 'There's cleaner company there.”
― Edith Pargeter, quote from The Heaven Tree Trilogy
“He could not be a breaker, it was against his bent.”
― Edith Pargeter, quote from The Heaven Tree Trilogy
“along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain. On either side the gutters ran with an infant chuckle and gurgle, baby streams being amused with themselves. The”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from The Gate to Women's Country
“The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Housekeeper and the Professor
“Talent is something rare and beautiful and precious,
and it must not be allowed to go to waste.”
― George Selden, quote from The Cricket in Times Square
“Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story.”
― Paul Auster, quote from Leviathan
“The citizens of the City of Rome, therefore, could not believe it when toward the end of the first decade of the fifth century, they woke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and all his forces parked at their gates. He might as well have been the king of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, or any other of the inconsequential outlanders that civilized people have looked down their noses at throughout history. It was preposterous. They dispatched a pair of envoys to conduct the tiresome negotiation and send him away. The envoys began with empty threats: any attack on Rome was doomed, for it would be met by invincible strength and innumerable ranks of warriors. Alaric was a sharp man, and in his rough fashion a just one. He also had a sense of humor. “The thicker the grass, the more easily scythed,” he replied evenly. The envoys quickly recognized that their man was no fool. All right, then, what was the price of his departure? Alaric told them: his men would sweep through the city, taking all gold, all silver, and everything of value that could be moved. They would also round up and cart off every barbarian slave. But, protested the hysterical envoys, what will that leave us? Alaric paused. “Your lives.” In that pause, Roman security died and a new world was conceived.”
― Thomas Cahill, quote from How the Irish Saved Civilization
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