Knows Quotes - Page 27

• A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.

  W. H. Auden

  Silly, Book, Passion

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• Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. ...But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.

  Jean Rhys

  Thinking, Mind, Doubt

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• Everyone always talks about how well mothers know their children. No one ever seems to notice how well children know their mothers.

  Lisa Unger

  Mother, Children, Wells

  Lisa Unger (2010). “Fragile: A Novel”, p.256, Crown

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• I know what blood poisoning is, Katniss," says Peeta. "Even if my mother isn't a healer." I'm jolted back in time, to another wound, another set of bandages. "You said that same thing to me in the first Hunger Games. Real or not real?" "Real," he says. "And you risked your life getting the medicine that saved me?" "Real." I shrug. "You were the reason I was alive to do it.

  Suzanne Collins

  Mother, Real, Medicine

  Suzanne Collins (2010). “Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3)”, p.321, Scholastic Inc.

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• It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?" "Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

  Irving Stone

  Anger, Use, Fuel

  Irving Stone (1981). “Irving Stone, three complete novels”, Random House Value Publishing

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• I wouldn't want to assume that all men are like you. If I did, I know I would give them up entirely

  Patricia Cornwell

  Men, Giving, Want

  Patricia Cornwell (2010). “The Body Farm: Scarpetta 5”, p.93, Simon and Schuster

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• The thing about love is that we can't control whether we get it, but we can control whether we give it. And each feels as good as the other. Your heart doesn't know if it's loving a man, a book, or a puppy. If your heart were that smart, it would be your brain.

  Lisa Scottoline

  Smart, Book, Heart

  Lisa Scottoline, Francesca Serritella (2015). “Truly Funny Stories Vol. 1: Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog and My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space”, p.277, St. Martin's Press

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• I bet you Cinderella didn't get along with Prince Charming's friends. Oh sure, the knights and barons probably put up with her on account that she was pretty and had such dainty feet and all, but you should know every duchess and contess in the kingdom hated her guts.

  Janette Rallison

  Knights, Feet, Kingdoms

  Janette Rallison (2009). “How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend”, p.7, Penguin

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• When anything bad happens to me or someone I know, I always know who to blame. My no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.

  Louis Sachar

  Dirty, Pigs, Grandfather

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• Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.

  George Eliot

  Mean, Giving, Would Be

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• I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

  Michael Cunningham

  Regret, Writing, Mean

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.67, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that." "You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all." "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.

  Michael Cunningham

  Party, Sick, Faces

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• The mountains are so beautiful they make me ache inside because the moment I look away I know I shall need to see them again. And I cannot spend the rest of my life standing on the spot starting at shifting sunlight and mist and shadows across the sea.

  Anne Perry

  Beautiful, Sea, Shadow

  Anne Perry (2010). “A Breach of Promise: A William Monk Novel”, p.57, Ballantine Books

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• Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Fear, Lonesome, Trekking

  'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) pt. 6

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• But when the other end of the line picked up, it was his voicemail that answered, not the man himself. "I know how devastated you must be to miss me," his cheery voice said, "but leave a message, and I'll try to ease your agony as soon as possible.

  Richelle Mead

  Men, Agony, Voice

  Richelle Mead (2013). “Vampire Academy: The Complete Collection”, p.816, Penguin

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• Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.

  Kate Atkinson

  Secret, Grew Up, Amelia

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• Mundies die awfully easily, don't they?" "Isabelle, you know it's bad luck to talk about death in a sickroom.

  Cassandra Clare

  Luck, Bad Luck, Dies

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

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• The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

  Stephen Fry

  People, Care, Failing

  Stephen Fry (2012). “The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography”, p.54, The Overlook Press

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• If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to get me drunk," I said to Ranger. "Not drunk," Ranger said. "Just relaxed and naked.

  Janet Evanovich

  Thinking, Drunk, Trying

  Janet Evanovich (2010). “Sizzling Sixteen”, p.275, Macmillan

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• After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Father, Cities, America

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Cat's Cradle: A Novel”, p.17, Dial Press

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• Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even "humble" attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe.

  David F. Wells

  Attitude, Humble, Humility

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• Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

  George Eliot

  Grief, Struggle, Fall

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• Morelli grabbed the front of my shirt, pulled me to him, and kissed me. It was a great kiss, but I didn't know what the heck it meant. It seemed to me a breaking up kiss would have had less tongue.

  Janet Evanovich

  Kissing, Tongue, Shirts

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• With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.

  Carl Jung

  Art, Eye, Light

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• It is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain. You will also see that a great many people know perfectly well how silly and camp and trivial their fandom is. They do not check in their minds when they enter a fan site. Judgement is not necessarily fled to brutish beasts, and men have not quite lost their reason. Which is all a way of questioning whether pop-culture hero worship is really so psychically damaging, so erosive of cognitive faculties, so corrupting of the soul of mankind as we are so often told.

  Stephen Fry

  Silly, Hero, Reality

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