“Better foolish and honest than clever and false.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“To learn, you must be humble. You must be prepared to admit your ignorance. You must allow yourselves to be filled with the vital information presented to you via the skills and dedication of those who have gone before you down the long path to enlightenment.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“there is no courage in being fearless. Do you not know that? A person who knows fear and yet can still think of others, well, he be a brave man.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“Reputation is for those who can afford it.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“Nevertheless, disease and misfortune knew no social bounds. Nor did the immensely dangerous business of childbirth.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“For whatever time we might have, my love. For whatever time we might have.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“And secrets are dangerous. They start small but grow with every evasive answer or outright lie that protects them. Nevertheless, I confess to finding the closeness such conspiracy breeds irresistibly delicious.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“Slowly Tegan looked up and I saw wonderment on her face. It was of the variety only ever found in those young enough to yet have minds as open as the oceans and hearts longing to have proof of magic.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
“Alas my love you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so longer
Delighting in your company.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
Greensleeves was my heart of joy,
And who but my Lady Greensleeves.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter
Paula Brackston
Born place: in The United Kingdom
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“The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation in the air itself.… The whale had submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge … where my heart stopped.… Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant … staring out to sea!… A female with a left tusk broken off near the base.… I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her from a color photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the title “The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.” This was the Matriarch herself.… She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The underrumble of the surf would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for an animal used to being surrounded by low and comforting frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best thing. My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vision of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary took place.… The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind. I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for a mere man.… Early afternoon. They were coming to this place, to this tall grass, all along. They will feed here for a while and then, because there’s no water right here, go down to where those egrets are. There’s water there. After they’ve had a good drink, they might make a big loop and come back here again later to feed some more. It will be a one-family-at-a-time choice as the adults decide when to drink and bathe. When elephants are finally ready to make a significant move, everyone points in the same direction. But they do wait until the matriarch decides. “I’ve seen families cued up waiting for half an hour,” comments Vicki, “waiting for the matriarch to signal, ‘Okay.’” And now they go. Makelele, eleven years old, walks with a deep limp. Five years ago he showed up with a broken right rear leg. It must have been agony, and it’s healed at a horrible angle, almost as if his knee faces backward, shaping that leg like the hock on a horse. Yet he is here, surviving with a little help from his friends. “He’s slow,” Vicki acknowledges. “It’s remarkable that he’s managing, but his family seems to wait for him.” Another Amboseli elephant, named Tito, broke a leg when he was a year old, probably from falling into a garbage pit.”
― Carl Safina, quote from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
“Oh, pfft. I manage. With any paper one sticks under their nose and plenty of self-possession, one can get through, Especially a woman. Sometimes I take an armload of parcels and bags and drop every single one as I try to find my identity cards, chatting all the while, and they wave me through out of sheer irritation.'
Lili exhaled a long steam of smoke. 'To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that's why women are good as it. Our lives are already boring. We jump an Uncle Edward's offer because we can't stand the thought of working in a file room anymore, or teaching a class full of runny-nosed children their letters. Then we discover this job is deadly dull as well, but at least there's the enlivening thought that someone might put a Luger to the back of our necks. It's still better than shooting ourselves, which we know we're going to do if we have to type one more letter or pound one more Latin verb into a child's ivory skull.”
― Kate Quinn, quote from The Alice Network
“So it is with Moslem women and their veils,’ Michelangelo said. ‘When they saw Muhammad’s wives wearing veils, they sought to imitate them, and so now nearly all Islamic women wear veils even though there is no stipulation in their Holy Koran that they do so.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“Straight-faced, Hamon said, "I'm honored to be working alongside someone with such expert woodland knowledge, superior battle skills, and an impressive beard."
Ven stroked his beard. "Indeed you are.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, quote from The Queen of Blood
“Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.” THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, JOHN LE CARRÉ”
― Brittany Cavallaro, quote from The Last of August
UR
Withering Tights
Woodcutters
Lola Rose
Lemonade Mouth
The Birth of TragedyBookQuoters 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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