Gordon Gaus > Gordon's Quotes

“Only someone watching him closely like Celena would have noticed his intense preoccupation, and that something in a split second had happened to him.  She wondered where he had gone when he should have been listening to the sermon, where his soul had gone went it had left his body.”
― Barbara Sontheimer, Victor's Blessing

“She peeped through one of the small holes in the outer wall rising up from the walkway. The world on the outside was nothing but countryside now. Dirt roads, like chocolate ribbons, disappeared into woods or green fields in the distance.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Mary tried to look reassuring. “It’s a house party, he said,” she directed at the Falconers, “Sir Viktor’s holding a house party for the convenience of the police. It’s like an old-fashioned mystery novel.”
― Susan Rowland, Murder on Family Grounds

“She thought he was the worst of the worst.”
― Becky Wilde, Bratva Connection: Maxim

“Remember, your mission is to love, expecting nothing in return.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Like the blind man said as he wandered into a cannibal village . . .

“Alright! The country fair must be right up ahead. I smell barbecue!”
― John Rachel

“You also would love to hang out with Logan. And don’t even try to deny, you think Logan is super-hot. I know you. You like him, and he likes you. He was insanely worried about you last night. He’s either head over heels for you or he’s your guardian angel. He was insanely worried about you last night. If I didn’t know you had just met, I would swear he was in love with you.” Meredith said in an excited tone.”
― Hope Worthington, Shifting Moon: Shifting Moon Saga, Book 1

“Saskia lay back again, closing her eyes and continued eating mandarin wedges. After a pause, she added, “I think that the biggest danger for people like you and me is that we start blaming people for things that happen to us. Bullies smell that kind of thing from miles away. People like you and me have to stop thinking about our limitations and start thinking about our talents and not let other people define us.”
― Miriam Verbeek, The Forest

“It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.
And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.
Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink.
But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength.
Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance?
Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“If you’re Irish enough, you can go an entire lifetime filled with conversations that never took place, like those”
― Leon Uris, Redemption: Three Extraordinary Irish Families on an Epic Odyssey of Love and Freedom in WWI

“Life is too short to worry about what other people think,”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Don't judge a boy by its cover!”
― RJ Palacio

“Your physical and emotional health are in danger.”
― Arelis Calkins, Rising Above Adversity: Healing and Nurturing your Inner Child

“No human figures were in the painting; had there been, and she would have removed them by repositioning the painting.”
― Isham Cook, The Tao of Poison

“After all her years in the Pietà, she had learned the greatest gift she could give them was dispensing words of encouragement that prodded them forward.”
― Jennifer Wizbowski, Poinsettia Girl: The Story of Agata della Pieta

“Did you splice my—DNA?”
Hannah puts her hand on the side of his face and looks him square in the eyes. “Your girlfriend was kind enough to let me pull some marrow from her rib, Romeo.”
― Joseph A. Anderson, Eden 2:b

“The timbre of Willa’s voice fluctuated from scarcely audible to maniacal while expressing her displeasure of being part of the family outing to begin with. “This was all Mom’s idea and it’s her fault we got hurt.”
            Why on earth would you say that?”
She was all happy again and we were supposed to just get over how she blamed me for Griff’s death. We had to look at the pretty flowers and that stupid waterfall from the cliff.” Willa grabbed her headphones. Discussion over.”
― JoDee Neathery, A Kind of Hush

“Ernest, your name shall be Hengest which is the Germanic name for a stallion.”
― Michael G. Kramer, Full Story of the Anglo-Saxon Invasion

“Strange how things turn out. Two birds, one stone and all that.' McBlane chuckled at his own impromptu joke. 'But things have worked out for the best and now we all get to work together,' he said, and a smile spread across his face as easy as a politician's lie.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“I didn’t train to look fit. That never interested me. I trained to stay capable.”
― D.L. Maddox, THE SUPER: A CONSPIRACY THRILLER

“Their temporary home filled with the scent of soup, ink and fresh paper and the reassuring harmonic vibration of piano strings.”
― Marcia Breece, The Last Bottle

“The image of the sensual, sleep-laden Naomi made him smile. And wish he’d been lying on the pillow next to her when she’d opened her eyes. Lucky pillow.”
― Lotchie Burton, Gabriel's Fire

“You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“She flinched when I did it, and that involuntary response of hers satisfied me in some small, cheap way. I never claimed I was lovable. Never said I wasn’t a son of a bitch.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“mentor is someone who has already done what you want to do and is successful at doing it. Don't find an advisor. An advisor is someone who tells you how to do it but may not have personally done it.”
― Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad's CASHFLOW QUADRANT

“these Romans counted their lineage through the male line, rather than sensibly through the mother; it was silly, for how could any man ever know precisely who had fathered any woman’s child?”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka