Jerry B > Jerry's Quotes

“What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Exactness of intention produces elegance of style.”
― Nathan Milstein, From Russia to the West: The Musical Memoirs and Reminiscences of Nathan Milstein

“A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.”
― Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

“He smiled hesitantly and she smiled back in the same fashion, but he was unsettled by the thought that Muriel had undergone a transformation. Some of the stuff that had come out of her mouth lately, about God or babies, made him wonder if she’d had a brain transplant at some point in the last ten years. It was funny what happened to people after forty, when they realized that our place here on earth was leased, not owned.”
― Scott Turow, Reversible Errors

“Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”
― Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop

“There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song -- the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.”
― E.B. White, One Man's Meat

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“American farm leaders are correct in arguing that our agriculture still must look forward to a definite ‘surplus’ problem. What they tend to overlook, however, is of what our ‘surplus’ exists. Fundamentally, America’s long-term agricultural problem is not one of ‘surplus’ cotton, wheat, or grapefruit. Rather, it is one of ‘surplus’ farmers.”
― William H. Nichols

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Character is much easier kept than recovered.”
― Thomas Paine

“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“No one wants advice - only corroboration. ”
― John Steinbeck

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious -- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the ‘light ineffable’.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”
― Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life

“All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson

“Clubs, fraternities, nations—these are the beloved barriers in the way of a workable world, these will have to surrender some of their rights and some of their ribs. A ‘fraternity’ is the antithesis of fraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality. Anyone who remembers back to his fraternity days at college recalls the enthusiasts in his group, the rabid members, both young and old, who were obsessed with the mystical charm of membership in their particular order. They were usually men who were incapable of genuine brotherhood, or at least unaware of its implications. Fraternity begins when the exclusion formula is found to be distasteful. The effect of any organization of a social and brotherly nature is to strengthen rather than diminish the lines which divide people into classes; the effects of states and nations is the same, and eventually these lines will have to be softened, these powers will have to be generalized.”
― E.B. White, One Man's Meat

“Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him - why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“But he still lingered, feeling the wind lift his hair and grateful for another minute of peace. He was grateful, too, that Kate Miskin could share it with him without the need to speak and without making him feel that her silence was a conscious discipline. He had chosen her because he needed a woman in his team and she was the best available. The choice had been partly rational, partly instinctive and he was beginning to realize just how well his instinct had served him. It would have been dishonest to say that there was no hint of sexuality between them. In his experience there nearly always was, however repudiated or unacknowledged, between any reasonable attractive heterosexual couple who worked together. He wouldn’t have chosen her if he had found her disturbingly attractive but the attraction was there and he wasn’t immune to it. But despite this pinprick of sexuality, perhaps because of it, he found her surprisingly restful to work with. She had an instinctive knowledge of what he wanted; she knew when to be silent; she wasn’t overly deferential. He suspected that with part of her mind, she saw his vulnerabilities more clearly, and understood him better and was more judgmental than were any of his male colleagues.

{ by Adam Dalgliesh, of his teammate Kate Miskin }”
― P.D. James, A Taste for Death

“Efficiency and focus are the keys to success.”
― Robert Crais, Voodoo River

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”
― William Hazlitt

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“She suddenly understood what Edmund had been saying about the energy of love and light… blossoming outward infinitely to fill the universe.
Love is not a finite emotion.
We don’t have only so much to share.
Our hearts create love as we need it.
Just as parents could love a newborn instantly without diminishing their love for each other, so now could Ambra feel affection for two different men.
Love truly is not a finite emotion, she realized. It can be generated spontaneously out of nothing at all.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack ”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers

“[Marta Stern to her father Sandy:] “Science is where the truth is in our world,” she said that night in the office. “What once belonged to religion or philosophy is now the business of science. That’s where we’ll learn what’s really unknown about being here on Earth.”
― Scott Turow, The Last Trial

“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”
― Mark Twain

“Brother Clarence had wanted her to take over as song leader, and she had turned it down. If what she was hearing from the speakers was the direction the church was going in, it was just as well. She was forty-two, and she knew every generation thought their music was better than the next generation’s music, but this truly was garbage. Absolute garbage. Sugary ballads to Jesus, crowing anthems, trance inducing chorus repetitions. And why exactly did DeWayne need a ten-person praise team on stage all singing the melody?”
― Tammy Oberhausen, The Evolution of the Gospelettes