“It takes a great deal of courage to stand alone even if you believe in something very strongly.”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“Nine of us now seem to feel that the defendant is innocent, but we're just gambling on probabilities. We may be wrong. We may be trying to return a guilty man to the community. No one can really know. But we have a reasonable doubt, and this is a safeguard that has enormous value in our system. No jury can declare a man guilty unless it's sure. We nine can't understand how you three are still so sure. Maybe you can tell us.”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“Look, this boy's been kicked around all his life. You know-living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. He spent a year and a half in an orphanage while his father served a jail term for forgery. That's not a very good head start. He's had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That's all.”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“TEN [exploding]. Bright! He's a common ignorant slob. He don't even speak good English!
ELEVEN [slowly]. He doesn't even speak good English.”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“Well, it's not easy to stand alone against the ridicule of others. He gambled for support and I gave it to him.”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“This is a quiet, frightened, insignificant old man who has been nothing all his life, who has never had recognition, his name in the newspapers. Nobody knows him, nobody quotes him, nobody seeks his advice after seventy-five years. That's a very sad thing, to be nothing. A man like this needs to be recognized, to be listened to, to be quoted just once. This is very important. It would be so hard for him to recede into the background ...”
― Reginald Rose, quote from Twelve Angry Men
“Mrs Grayshott was no tattle-monger; and since she had a great deal of reserve Abby knew that only a stringent sense of duty could have forced her to overcome her distaste of talebearing. What she knew, either from her own observation, or from the innocent disclosures of her daughter, she plainly thought to be too serious to be withheld from Fanny's aunt. At the same time, thought Abigail, dispassionately considering her, the well-bred calm of her manners concealed an over-anxious disposition, which led her to magnify possible dangers.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Black Sheep
“A Forge, and a Scythe"
One minute I had the windows open
and the sun was out. Warm breezes
blew through the room.
(I remarked on this in a letter.)
Then, while I watched, it grew dark.
The water began whitecapping.
All the sport-fishing boats turned
and headed in, a little fleet.
Those wind-chimes on the porch
blew down. The tops of our trees shook.
The stove pipe squeaked and rattled
around in its moorings.
I said, "A forge, and a scythe."
I talk to myself like this.
Saying the names of things --
capstan, hawser, loam, leaf, furnace.
Your face, your mouth, your shoulder
inconceivable to me now!
Where did they go? It's like
I dreamed them. The stones we brought
home from the beach lie face up
on the windowsill, cooling.
Come home. Do you hear?
My lungs are thick with the smoke
of your absence.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from All of Us: The Collected Poems
“His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.
- discussing Ebenezer Howards' Garden City”
― Jane Jacobs, quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities
“The closer Finn`s island come to extinction, the more I wandered back in my mind to the lives that come before us, the huts and the houses, the remains of animals and clothing, the coins and the latrines and cooking pots, the messages from the past left in bones and kitchen dumps. And the people.
Sometimes I thought about the content of those lives, the intangible things that leave no fossils and no marks, no history. Would people from the future excavate traces of passion? Of hope, disappointment, despair? Or would the entire human race end up drowned and forgotten, buried under waves of melting ice, with no on left to dig us up or wonder at what was or what might have been?”
― Meg Rosoff, quote from What I Was
“But now her children were grown-up and she felt every inch of the distance between them, stretching further over the years.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
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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