“Just because you don't know everything don't mean you know nothing.”
― Karen Cushman, quote from The Midwife's Apprentice
“. . . she dreamed of nothing, for she hoped for nothing and expected nothing. It was as cold and dark inside her as out in the frosty night.”
― Karen Cushman, quote from The Midwife's Apprentice
“She was not as stupid as some I have had, and better company, but still perhaps her going was for the best. She was not what I needed."
"Because I failed," whispered Alyce in the shadows.
"Because she gave up," continued the midwife. "I need an apprentice who can do what I tell her, take what I give her, who can try and risk and fail and try again and not give up...”
― Karen Cushman, quote from The Midwife's Apprentice
“I know what I want. A full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world.”
― Karen Cushman, quote from The Midwife's Apprentice
“Alyce," she breathed. Alyce sounded clean and smart. You could love someone maned Alyce. She looked back at the face in the water. "This is me, Alyce." It was right. So the newly called Alyce shifted the pack on her shoulders, and with her head back and bare feet solid on the ground, she headed back to the midwife's cottage and never noticed when it grew dark, for heat and light were within her.”
― Karen Cushman, quote from The Midwife's Apprentice
“I read her file.” Voice strong and steady again, Peabody shifted back. “I know who she was, what she was. Now I know she left you with an animal. It’s good she’s dead.”
Stunned, Eve turned her head, stared. “That’s not very Free-Ager.”
“Fuck that.” Peabody’s eyes flashed like supernovas. “Fuck tolerance and understanding. Yeah, you’d have put her in a cage for the rest of her pathetic, evil life. But maybe sometime during her rot, she’d have put it together. Maybe she’d have remembered you. She’d have used that on you; she’d have tried. Before you scared the piss out of her, if you could get to her before Roarke. If he could get there before me. And it’s good she was such a selfish, pitiful excuse for a human being so she didn’t remember you, didn’t think about you all those years. She might’ve recognized you, especially after Roarke. She might’ve seen you on screen, and recognized you, caused you more grief and trouble. Dead’s better.”
― J.D. Robb, quote from Delusion in Death
“What is life, in the end, but a series of small victories and larger failures?”
― Guillermo del Toro, quote from The Fall
“By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world.”
― John Banville, quote from The Book of Evidence
“Fate was the only lesson a god needed to learn. It was their only hard limit.”
― Kendare Blake, quote from Antigoddess
“Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others. The cost, in the end, is a tangled-up financial system. Untangling it requires acts of commercial heroism—and even then the fix might not work. There was simply too much more easy money to be made by elites if the system worked badly than if it worked well. The whole culture had to want to change. “We know how to cure this,” as Brad had put it. “It’s just a matter of whether the patient wants to be treated.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
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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