All the friends in the world are in the fountain of a pen.
Life makes beggars out of those who have joyful hearts, taxing the living with hardship and tribulation, but the charity of companionship, the currency of shared and unmitigated love, alleviates all disconsolation.
My face is rather like a collision waiting to happen: head-on I can be borne, but turn sideways, and it is all calamity.
Swearing is a currency the countryside spends well.
No one needs Independence. We all just need tea and air conditioners.
I don’t talk ill about people I don’t know,” said Bartleby. “I only disparage them in silence and hope they die.
The old who refuse to die merely on principle live on forever, to hate life and complain of all the things they could have been spared had they the good sense to die young.
We come by aurora,with a heavy and sovereign tread,with the might of matriarchs to furnish our shoulders,with the apricity of light to crown our heads
And the matron sighed over the destiny of ladies in good society, whose moral judgement led them to love unabashedly and whose depravity led them to pay for it.
The greatest ugliness in the world is seeing so beautiful a creature spoil themselves on stupidity.
The skies gave way to the full ascendence of morning and clouds skittered across the expanse, the variations on a nebulous theme woven on a celestial loom.
Attracting musicians is rather like inviting flies over to tea: they are tolerable for half an hour, but when they begin to touch the food, you either wish they would go home or die.
The dust of thirty years hung lifeless in shafts of morning light, the gilding of perfectly prim pages shone incanescent, the shriek of rolling ladders mourned in perennial soliloquy.
Fantasy for the most part is really just reality reflected through a storybook lens.
Do what is right and what is good.” — Bryeison to Alasdair before going to his death on the battlefield.
The unconscious fabric of human destiny had done with her, unraveling all her grievances and reweaving them as joyous circumstance.
Regrettable was the gallantry of great men who risked themselves for others.
The captain’s eyes betrayed what his countenance must conceal: the anguish of an ancient being who must honour his birthright by living beyond those whom he would have given much to keep.
If the sale of flesh could be made as easily as the sale of spiritual exemption, the prescience of a dedicated businessman might be well preserved.
What will I do when you’re gone?” said Alasdair, with a faltering voice.Bryeison placed a hand on his shoulder and said, with raging tranquility, “Do what is good and what is right.
The past is behind us,” said Boudicca,”but the difficulty there is we keep looking over our shoulders.
But the world hinges on good fathers and those who would be the merchants of confidence.
Abuse really is its own alphabet. Those who have not gone through it cannot understand it fully. The echos of violence hang in subconscious long after the threat is gone.
A scientist does not have hope, sir. Hope is what a man has in the absence of answers, and once he does empirical experimentation, he replaces hope with knowledge and disappointment.
A six mile meteorite cannot compare with a culinary cataclysm of this magnitude.
The words ‘when I take you home’ echoed in the captain’s mind, caroming off that private place where all his suspicions and uncertainties slept.
I know we are supposed to welcome anyone who vows to protect the kingdom, but really, anyone will do anything for a copper these days, and where pride and promises are saleable, expendable men come very cheap indeed.
There is a very great difference between older and old, the former being desirable and the latter being inevitable.
A heart? Peppone knows where one is to be met with. There is always someone in the black market in need of dying early.
Any advice for how to be a successful author?””Yes. Don’t be a woman. And be dead. And do both at the same time, if you can.
The sins of my sex… A woman who is ugly is pitiable, but a man who is ugly is forgiven.
A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar’s heart.