Well Written Quotes

“And sometimes, he was less lucid. He'd run around his cell like a caged animal; he'd rock back and forth; he'd swing from topic to topic as if it was the only way to cross the jungle of his thoughts. ”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death

“The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama.”
― China Miéville, Kraken

“History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.”
― Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“If Molly had not been so entirely loyal to her friend, she might have
thought this constant brilliancy a little tiresome when brought into
every-day life; it was not the sunshiny rest of a placid lake, it was
rather the glitter of the pieces of a broken mirror, which confuses
and bewilders.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell

“I'd never had a host that was capable of superstition. It was an interesting sensation. Like knowing you were being watched without being able to find the watcher. It raised goose bumps on the nape of my neck.”
― Stephenie Meyer, The Host

“Nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a Base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God’s detritus.”
― Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“She gave a little jump and hung in the air a little way above the rug, then she slowly began to be drawn downwards and dropped ..”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Further and further afield he travelled. Taking ship, he sailed to a hot and passionate country where gypsy women dressed in scarlet, and their dark skin sweated as they danced tarantellas under a tambourine moon.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The Canterbury Tales

“As far as the eye could see, black rocks broke through the waves and tore the surf to shreds of white.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The Canterbury Tales

“Tears, like bitter rivers, streamed down his dried-up cheeks, as he stood swaying in his brother's arms.”
― Leon Garfield, Shakespeare Stories

“She said no more, and they went down the other dance and parted in silence; on each side dissatisfied, though not to an equal degree, for in Darcy's breast there was a tolerable powerful feeling towards her, which soon procured her pardon, and directed all his anger against another.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Nobody ever wanted to get hurt. But it still happened didn't it? No matter how careful you were, no matter how smart your puns. It happened all the time.”
― Melinda Braun, Stranded

“The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.”
― Herman Melville

“On the morning of King Richard's visit, the bright sun shone down into the stony streets, now alive with a restless sea of people, country and town folk alike.”
― John Burrows, The Adventures of Robin Hood

“The Miller glared round at us, then his ruined face collapsed into a grin that showed all his tombstone teeth.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The Canterbury Tales

“We were so disconsolate that even the apple blossoms of Ashford looked like tearful, pink-faced angels lamenting over us sorry bunch of sinners.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The Canterbury Tales

“In the evening of his life, January was suddenly plunged into an early night. He went stone blind.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The Canterbury Tales

“He was an old, old man, venerable as a mountain, and with much snow on top.”
― Leon Garfield, Shakespeare Stories

“As always, the subject of Bianca lay between them like a loaded gun – deadly, easy to reach, impossible to ignore.”
― Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus

“She bit back a protest as he took her hand in his. She gawked as one long-fingered hand grasped hers and stared, unblinking, at the black pen that appeared from nowhere and began moving against her skin, the tip as cold and sharp as those eyes.
[...] His face remained emotionless as he made small, careful lines with the pen. The steady impression of the ballpoint tickled, creating knots in her stomach.”
― Kelly Creagh, Nevermore

“I hated my parents for making me go through all that hard work, but now I look at them and celebrate that they pushed me to be independent and be the person that they knew I could be”
― Gabe Adams-Wheatley