All Quotes

"Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in our lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same."

"“I've done my best, but the boy is unteachable. He doubts everything, and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of science.” “In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense.” “He is unwilling to accept the idea that some things remain mysteries, comprehensible only to the mind of God. Ambiguity makes him saucy, and paradox causes open rebellion.” “An obnoxious child.”"

"It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others."

"A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him."

"“I’ve never seen a soft heart turn hard,” said Taleswapper. “At least not without good reason.”"

"I own the whole world, and folks haven't been keeping up too well on the payments."

"This is what I want to do forever, each one thought. Rise in the morning, come to the mill, and work all day with him beside me. Never mind that the wish was impossible. Never mind that they might never see each other again, once the boy left for his apprenticeship back in the place of his birth. That only added to the sweetness of the moment, which would soon become a memory, would soon become a dream."

"Men like Jackson were so upright and honest-seeming, but Hooch knew that there wasn't no such thing as a good man, just a man who wasn't bought yet, or wasn't in deep enough trouble, or didn't have the guts to reach out and take what he wanted. That's all that virtue ever boiled down to, so far as Hooch ever saw in his life."

"No, no, no, Hooch told himself silently. Getting even don't amount to nothing in this world. Getting even only gets you behind. The best revenge is to get rich enough to make them all call you sir, that's how you get even with these boys."

"When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth."

"There's always hope... even when there isn't faith. And sometimes, without hope or faith, there must be charity."

"Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife."

"He knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden the queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter."

"Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? Here is the undoing of your strength: I am not a weak woman. I am not a little queen. And your mercy will be your undoing."

"Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult."

"When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood."

"A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it."

"You're the sort of enemy your enemy must love."

"She did not send for him until she was afraid; she was not afraid until he undid her work; he did not undo her work until he was past loving her."

"I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew."

"It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent."

"I want to see the king. Wonderful. I'm glad for you. Why are you so glad? Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant."

"There must be a special place in hell reserved for you. I've been to hell. It's a better place than this."

"Your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope."

"I'm losing Savanna. That's good. No one should own someone else."

"I walked down the hill, forgot philosophy, and joined the human race again. Nobody was particularly glad to see me."

"I immediately felt so comfortable there. Or if not comfortable, at least willing to bear the discomforts because they fit the awkward places in my heart."

"You are not what you seem. So many people have said that that I'm beginning to think that's precisely how I do seem. What is it I seem to be that you have now discovered that I'm not?"

"There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger."

"He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death."

"I had never believed I had a soul until then, when it laid bare a hurt more deep than any part of me could bear."

"Keep your freedom, keep your immortality, but somewhere along the line I hope you figure out what you're living forever for. What noble purpose you mean to achieve. Because you're no good to anyone here, not even yourselves."

"Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst."

"For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longed to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done."

"People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else."

"You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything."

"But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: to see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost."

"Even the devil gives some justice to his victims, when they're beyond all help."

"Faithfulness had taken me by surprise. I wondered how long the phase would last."

"If you could stop the suffering and dying, and didn't stop it, then you are guilty. It is your fault. We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them."

"If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe."

"You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else."

"Having never been in control of his own life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free."

"I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me."

"I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions."

"You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you."

"He exuded confidence without ever looking as if he wanted to make sure everyone else knew how confident he was."

"There was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore."

"Even the good she found in him was really the goodness she had put in him, the goodness he had put on himself as a disguise in order to get her to marry him."

"This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don't want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn't that bad. And it isn't that hard."