“Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons
“The best way of travel, however, if you aren't in any hurry at all, if you don't care where you are going, if you don't like to use your legs, if you don't want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon, you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons
“It seems strange to me that mechanical progress always seems to leave the slower demands of elegance far behind.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons
“That's the peculiar thing about nature," explained Mr. F., "it guards it's rarest treasures with greatest care.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons
“What's that?" he asked.
"A balance sheet," I said. "To keep track of your payments."
He asked whether Pop had written it or me. When I answered truthfully, he handed the paper back like the useless thing it was. "Thank you," he said. "I won't be needing this."
Which took me by surprise and set me stammering how it was proof he was making his payments, and how he should take it because it was the right and proper way to do business.
"The rules aren't the same for me as they are for you," Joseph replied, shaking his head. "Don't you know that, Will?" Which put my nose out of joint so bad that I told him he was being rude, and that I was only trying to do him a favor at no small risk to myself.
Joseph's face went blank as the cloudless sky overhead. He eyed the receipt. Said, "Thank you, Mr. William. But I can't accept." And got back on his bicycle.
"That all you got to say?" I near shouted, frustrated at how easily he'd turned my good intentions into a fool's errand. And the quickest flash of hate you ever did see danced across the dark of his eyes.
I stood there, feeling awkward and a fool. Joseph put one foot on a pedal and said, real quiet, "If you'll excuse me, I've a funeral to attend."
Only then did I notice the band of mourning black around his upper arm.
"Who died?" I asked stupidly.
Joseph's eyes were flat. "Nobody important, Mr. William. Only a Negro boy like me.”
― Jennifer Latham, quote from Dreamland Burning
“Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.”
― quote from Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
“The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train
“You have the right to be mad, but be mad with a purpose. Be mad at the right thing.”
― Meghan Quinn, quote from Dear Life
Men at Arms
Genghis: Birth of an...
Waterfall
Edenbrooke
Relic
SavvyBookQuoters 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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