Terrible Quotes - Page 7

• My likely historical significance is a terrible burden. ~ Calvin

  Bill Watterson

  Historical, Burden, Significance

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• Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That's what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel - and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside.

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Thinking, Terrible Events, Special

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• Knowledge is a terrible burden. It may help you, but it might also destroy you.

  James Patterson

  May, Might, Helping

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• Beauty! Terrible Beauty! A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!

  Homer

  Eye, Rage From The Iliad, Goddess

  Homer (1996). “Homer in English”, Penguin Group USA

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• As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bag and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.

  Alan Moore

  Softball, Believe, Successful

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• NO!” The scream was the more terrible because he had never expected or dreamed that Professor McGonagall could make such a sound.

  J. K. Rowling

  Sound, Scream, Professor Mcgonagall

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• She was in a terrible marriage and she couldn't talk to anyone. He used to hit her, and in the beginning she told him that if it ever happened again, she would leave him. He swore that it wouldn't and she believed him. But it only got worse after that, like when his dinner was cold, or when she mentioned that she'd visited with one of the neighbors who was walking by with his dog. She just chatted with him, but that night, her husband threw her into a mirror.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Dog, Husband, Night

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• I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.

  Nick Hornby

  Sorry, Thinking, People

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• You think I have more than most people dream of? What other people dream of doesn't matter. I always had less than I ever dreamt of. All I ever dreamt of was family. A father and a mother. Most people don't even need to dream of such luxuries, they take them for granted. That is what I used to dwell on, alone in my bedroom. I dwelt as all children do, on the injustice. Injustice is the most terrible thing in the world, Oliver. Everything that is evil springs from it and only a cheap soul can abide it without anger.

  Stephen Fry

  Mother, Dream, Children

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• His sympathy made tears spring to Lina's eyes. Doon looked startled for a moment, and then he took a step toward her and wrapped his arms around her. He gave her a squeeze so quick and tight that it made her cough, and then it made her laugh. She realized all at once that Doon--thin, dark-eyed Doon with his troublesome temper and his terrible brown jacket and his good heart--was the person that she knew better than anyone now. He was her best friend.

  Jeanne DuPrau

  Spring, Heart, Eye

  Jeanne DuPrau (2012). “The Books of Ember Omnibus”, p.93, Random House Books for Young Readers

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• You're a terrible cook, Daniel." "I know," he replied, "But it's the effort that counts." "I hope that's not the slogan for your dental practice.

  Lisa Lutz

  Practice, Effort, Dental

  Lisa Lutz (2011). “Lisa Lutz Spellman Series E-Book Box Set: The Spellman Files, Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again”, p.193, Simon and Schuster

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• For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.

  Hermann Hesse

  Firsts, Bitter, Birth

  Ernest Hemingway, Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse (1971). “Ernest Hemingway, Knut Hamsun [and] Hermann Hesse”

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• I can’t see through clothes or anything. Just glamour skin. Except I can see through all of you, since your clothes aren’t real.” I stopped, horrified. “I mean, I don’t look—It’s hard to see you, and I like looking at your real face, but I don’t try to see anything, because—Oh gosh, this sounds terrible.” He had a funny look on his face, like he wasn’t sure what to think. “Huh. That’s never been an issue before. Maybe next time you could bring me some shorts.

  Kiersten White

  Real, Mean, Thinking

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• The numbing mind-ream of knowing you're alone not because people won't accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by remindings of why that solitude is preferable.

  Jhonen Vasquez

  Loneliness, Knowing, People

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• My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside, p. 27]

  John Burnside

  Father, Men, Might

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• Maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and fuuny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or ABe North in Tender in the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager.

  David Nicholls

  War, Drinking, Sadness

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• There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

  Paul Auster

  Men, Decision, Solitude

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• There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.

  Daniel Handler

  Running, People, Brave

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• Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.

  Stefan Zweig

  Children, Mean, Sleep

  Stefan Zweig (2015). “The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, Journey into the Past”, p.19, Pushkin Press

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• Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.

  Edmund Burke

  Pain, Ideas, Giving

  "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". Treatise by Edmund Burke, www.bartleby.com. 1757.

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• I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

  John Irving

  Night, Journey, Gone

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• And now, I’m going to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning, he said to Simon. “You,” he said to Jace, “well, I guess I’ll see you around. You’re the first Shadowhunter I’ve ever met.” “That’s too bad,” said Jace, “since all the ones you meet from now on will be a terrible letdown.” Kyle rolled his eyes and left, banging his bedroom door shut behind him.

  Cassandra Clare

  Morning, Eye, Sleep

  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.1519, Simon and Schuster

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• We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Las Vegas, Sky, Top Down

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas pt. 1 (1971)

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• When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.

  Jean Cocteau

  Dream, Animal, Reality

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• The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

  Roberto Bolano

  Children, Age, Veins

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