Karleen Zabaneh > Karleen's Quotes

“Samantha sent in mercenaries so fingers could not be pointed at the Minton Mining Company,” Morley replied.
“Okay. Where is this leading?”
“The operation was a total disaster. The Fyfield Valley is the homeland of The Great Ones. They learnt of her plans and prepared an ambush. The only survivor is Claire Hyndman. She was the woman you just saw in the suspension unit.”
― Andrew R. Williams, Samantha's Revenge

“No truth on this goddamn planet ever made its way out of your mouth. If truth was hanging out of your nose you'd blow that goddamn truth bugger into a snot rag and toss it into a fire pit”
― Vera Jane Cook, Pleasant Day

“Evil does not alter easily.....”
― Olivia Hardy Ray, Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem

“The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years.

All business and politics is personal in the Philippines.

If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump.

They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on.

I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged.

I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy.

You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn.

Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race.

After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself.

It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up.

He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather.

The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up.

You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points]

Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse.

You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow.

In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil.

There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country.

Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us.

The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys.

The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time.

I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality.
The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent.

Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins.

Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it.

Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds.

Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising.

A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't.

Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill.

It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most.

Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold.

Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink?

She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.”
― John Richard Spencer

“Accepting the facts is always tough, so we search for forgiveness to this universe everyday to break the shackles, hurt is a prison and I from a very young young age refused to be held prisoner or even conform.”
― Aidan McNally, TWO sons TOO many

“More guns! No guns! Second Amendment! Guns kill! No, people kill!”
― David Baldacci, Memory Man

“Here’s what I would never, ever admit out loud: a part of me always thought it was some kind of secret compliment when someone got called a slut. It meant you were having sex. Which meant people wanted to have sex with you. Being a slut just meant you were normal. But I think maybe I’m wrong about that.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“President Kennedy’s assassination, less than two weeks ago, has struck the world dumb. It’s like no one wants to be the first to break the silence. Nothing seems important.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I believe the potluck tradition of entertaining is the equivalent of a teenage boy wanting to have sex with his girlfriend but who is too scared to go to CVS to buy condoms. If you can’t handle providing all the courses for your dinner party, you can’t handle the hosting duties of a dinner party.”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated...”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“You must have had such a great childhood with a man like that for your father. (Delphine)
Yeah. All puppy dogs and rainbows and those weird furry people with padded coat hangers on their heads that look like space aliens on acid. (Jericho)
You mean the Teletubbies? (Berith)
The fact that you know what they're called, Berith, truly scares me. (Jericho)
As a demon of torture, it behooves me to know all things that are deeply annoying. You'd be amazed how many people in the modern age no longer fear zombies as much as Teletubbies. (Berith)
Not really. I'd rather battle a brain-eating zombie any day than hear them sing. (Jericho)”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dream Warrior

“After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things others people didn't know.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Madness Underneath

“Boy bands are sent by God to aid women of all ages in their quest to avoid reality, but specifically to trick young women into believing that males think about topics other than sex.”
― Penny Reid, Friends Without Benefits

“Happiness from long ago that hasn’t carried into today turns into a sadness that’s too much to bear.”
― J.S. Latshaw, A Gallery of Mothers

“Shuller was thankful they’d found sheets for those who had been killed, but just the knowing who was under the sheet ... well, he wasn’t sure if that was still a kindness or made it worse for the imagination.”
― Kathleen Lopez, Thirteen for Dinner

“His name was Death. It was pronounced to rhyme with "teeth", but Bitterblue liked to mispronounce it by accident on occassion.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily drawn as a picture) by means of the sign for a depictable noun that had the same phonetic pronunciation. For instance, it’s easy to draw a recognizable picture of arrow, hard to draw a recognizable picture of life, but both are pronounced ti in Sumerian, so a picture of an arrow came to mean either arrow or life. The resulting ambiguity was resolved by the addition of a silent sign called a determinative, to indicate the category of nouns to which the intended object belonged. Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, the rebus principle.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

“Aristotle’s residence in Athens became untenable—he had, after all, been Alexander’s tutor—and he fled into exile, saying, with a reference to Socrates’ trial, that he was doing so “lest Athens sin twice against philosophy.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“We have chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.”
― Jonathan Swift

“She was knowingly punishing herself. That was the only reasonable explanation. There was no use in acting naive. What happened earlier in the day was proof that she was going to give in to his flirtation. It appeared she'd thrown caution to the wind and opened her arms to embrace everything that could go wrong in her life. What's one more problem to add to the pile?”
― Emem Uko, The Place That Gave

“The dead at Nyarubuye were, I'm afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there - these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn't settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

“Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“I'm the bitch who makes you a man.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“And I said well luckily I was mature and old enough to take this success at my age. It was bullshit.”
― Nicholas Evans

“Harry just blinked and shook his head, bewildered, and went with the flow. Sara looked at her son, her only child, with a tangible earnestness, the grin and grinding gone, replaced with a plea that softened her eyes and calmed her voice, Its not the prizes Harry. It doesn’t make any difference if I win or lose or if I just shake hands with the announcer. Its like a reason to get up in the morning.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“If I let myself love you, I won't throw myself in front of her. I'll throw myself in front of you.”
― Richelle Mead, Vampire Academy

“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.”
― Carson McCullers