“There is a passion in you that scares me.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“The preface? Why would he waste time with the preface? Skip the preface and move on to the meat of the thing!”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“It was as though, in one moment, he had become a stranger. And I a stranger to myself.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“You see, when medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. - Polidori”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“No, indeed, 'pig' is very expressive. And an excellent description of a fellow who flirts with his brother's beloved.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“If she can bite a vulture, she can jump a crack.
~Victor Frankenstein”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“Beyond the lake, over the mountains, the clouds were illuminated from within by a brilliant stutter of lightning, and in that split second Elizabeth and I were etched against the sky.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“Konrad had gone to the New World without me, and no matter how fast I ran westward, how close I kept to the sunsets, I would never catch up with him now.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“We all knew no respectable physician would remove my fingers just for the asking, and we had no time anyway.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“What do you make of him?" I asked Elizabeth.
"Apart from the fact he's clearly insane?"
"What can he learn from Konrad's blood?" I said. "Except that he needs it in his body to live!"
"There is something ghoulish about it."
"He's like a vampyre,”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“Behind us I saw the water, still welling up from the tunnel, curving round in a frothing serpentine torrent to plunge down the other descending passage. For a moment we all sat there and watched, numb and exhausted.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
“Do you worry it is sinful?" I asked.
She took a breath. "No," she said firmly. "God is the creator, and anything on this earth is here by His permission. I cannot think He minds if we use His creations - only how. For good or ill. What we seek is for good, so I will not worry about it.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from This Dark Endeavor
Kenneth Oppel
Born place: Port Alberni, British Columbia, Canada
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“..some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Fever Pitch
“I love you.’ For a start, we’d better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn’t leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we’ll use them without thought; we won’t be able to resist. Oh, we say we won’t, but we will. We’ll get drunk, or lonely, or – likeliest of all – plain damn hopeful, and there are the words gone, used up, grubbied”
― Julian Barnes, quote from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
“Ragnor and Catarina both begged him to give the instrument up. Random strangers on the street begged him to give the instrument up. Even cats ran away from him.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from What Really Happened in Peru
“In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The House of the Dead
“SCIENTISTS HAD KNOWN since the late nineteenth century that tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide. Victorian scientists had even been able to calculate the amount of gas in the smoke: up to 4 percent in cigarette smoke, and in Gettler’s own choice of tobacco, the cigar, between 6 and 8 percent. Gettler’s latest work theorized that chain smokers might suffer from low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. He speculated in a 1933 report that “headaches experienced by heavy smokers are due in part to the inhalation of carbon monoxide.” But his real interest lay less in their symptoms than in how much of the poison had accumulated in their blood, and how that might affect his calculations on cause of death. He approached that problem in his usual, single-minded way. To get a better sense of carbon monoxide contamination from smoking tobacco, Gettler selected three groups of people to compare: persons confined to a state institution in the relatively clean air of the country; street cleaners who worked in a daily, dusty cloud of car exhaust; and heavy smokers. As expected, carboxyhemoglobin blood levels for country dwellers averaged less than 1 percent saturation. The levels for Manhattan street cleaners were triple that amount, a solid 3 percent. But smokers came in the highest, higher than he’d expected, well above the nineteenth-century calculations. Americans were inhaling a lot more tobacco smoke than they had once done, and their saturation levels ranged from 8 to 19 percent. (The latter was from a Bronx cab driver who admitted to smoking six cigarettes on his way to Gettler’s laboratory, lighting one with the stub of another as he went.) It was safe to assume, Gettler wrote with his usual careful precision, that “tobacco smoking appreciably increases the carbon monoxide in the blood and cannot be ignored in the interpretation of laboratory results.” THE OTHER NOTABLE poison in tobacco smoke was nicotine.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Fire Star
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Wise Children
Reservation BluesBookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
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