“Most girls take one look at you and swoon. You've never had to really work for someone's affection or put effort into maintaining it. In many ways, your natural gifts have done you a disservice-- they've stunted your sensitivity and charm! You've never had to develop insight into what will make a girl laugh and come to love you for reasons that aren't handsome or heroic. That's why smees are experts on the subtle arts of courtship and seduction; nothing comes easy to us, but we do understand and live by the Lover's Maxim."
"And what on earth is the Lover's Maxim?" asked Maz, feeling very uninformed.
The smee cleared his throat. "If you can't be handsome, be rich. If you can't be rich, be strong. If you cant be strong, be witty."
"But what if you can't be witty?" Max wondered.
"Learn the guitar.”
― Henry H. Neff, quote from The Maelstrom
“The Lover's Maxim
'If you can'r be handsome, be rich. If you can't be roich, be strong. If you can't be strong, be witty'
'What if you can'r be witty?'
'Learn the guitar.”
― Henry H. Neff, quote from The Maelstrom
“You have the courage and will to overcome your fear and do what's required.”
― Henry H. Neff, quote from The Maelstrom
“In the common room, they found Emer dozing in her chair, Lila scratching at the door, and Mine stirring a large pot and peering at its contents with an anxious, irritated expression. With a groan, the Archmage strode across the room and flung open the windows.
"It just needs more basil," Mine assured him. "No, it does not," Bram declared. "It needs less garlic. Didn't I tell you to follow a recipe?"
"I did follow a recipe!" Shouted Mine, defiantly flinging the rest of the basil into the pot.
"Show it to me, then."
"I threw it in the fire!"
"What have I told you about lying, child?"
"To get better at it!”
― Henry H. Neff, quote from The Maelstrom
“Sorry, Toby," said Max, plucking up the smee by one end. "This will have to do." He unceremoniously dunked the creature into a nearby pitcher of water. "Better?"
"Invigorated," groused the smee. "And now I will ask you to kindly put me down and never to grab me by that particular part of my anatomy again."
Horrified, Max promptly dropped the smee onto its pillow.”
― Henry H. Neff, quote from The Maelstrom
Henry H. Neff
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“Why?' Said Harry. 'For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea - could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn't matter, because the big idea is always the same - wouldn't it be good if only EVERYONE was the same as ME -if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.
'But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that's where the trouble starts. That's when they show up at your door to make the ones who don't fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon's Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it - you and them - the THEM become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it's always open season on THEM.”
― Stephen Hunt, quote from The Court of the Air
“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”
― Alain de Botton, quote from Kuinka Proust voi muuttaa elämäsi
“But I thought about all the things that had to have spun into place in order for us to be alive and for us to be right there, right then. I thought about the few thing we thought we knew and the billions of things we couldn't know, all spinning, whirling our there somewhere.”
― Sharon Creech, quote from The Great Unexpected
“I still feel haunted,' she said. 'I thought it would go away. I thought if I faced it, it would all go away.'
'It doesn't go away. Ever. But you get better at it.'
'At what?'
'At being haunted,' Avasarala said.”
― quote from Caliban's War
“The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict; for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. . . . What you remember is a part of you. For you must be as God created you. . . . Let all this madness be undone for you, and turn in peace of the remembrance of God, still shining in your quiet mind.”
― Wayne W. Dyer, quote from The Shift: Taking Your Life from Ambition to Meaning
Tao Te Ching
Zen and the Art of M...
Blood River: A Journ...
The Eye of the World
Doctor Zhivago
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