Bette Rolling > Bette's Quotes

“These walls breathe with a consciousness fueled by the powers of the Empians.”
― Marie Montine, Mourning Grey: Part Three The Guardians Of The Temple Saga

“Beef had hit $300 a kilo. Not that he could recall the last time he’d tasted real beef.”
― Barry Kirwan, The Eden Paradox

“Haven’t you ever done something you regretted when you woke up the next morning?” Steven asked.
I didn’t want to tell him how many times.”
― M S M Barkawitz, Feeling Lucky

“I feel a tingling sensation in my body, and I can almost feel her lips in my mind now. I think she likes me, but I need to be sure.”
― Kumar Kinshuk, Ritualistic Murder

“Living up to his reputation as the hottest billionaire in town, Lachlan switched from boyish to devilishly handsome within a blink. With those ocean blue eyes, he offered so many shades of gorgeous I kept forgetting to breathe around him.”
― J.J. Sorel, A Taste of Peace

“The most difficult examinations are the ones that require us to take a hard look at ourselves and confront the things we don’t like.”
― Steve Pemberton, The Lighthouse Effect: How Ordinary People Can Have an Extraordinary Impact in the World

“I experienced what can only be described as a surreal moment in time; giddy with the prospect of a challenging case, but disheartened with the senseless death of a highly respected judge and family man. Why had he been murdered? Who was the killer? Why hadn’t the Tallahassee police been able to solve the case?”
― Behcet Kaya, Appellate Judge

“The five Roosevelt children had 17 marriages among them. They struggled to find security in love.”
― Anne Michaud, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Nine Political Wives

“The little Hexagon meditated on this a while and then said to me; "But you have been teaching me to raise numbers to the third power: I suppose three-to-the-third must mean something in Geometry; what does it mean?" "Nothing at all," replied I, "not at least in Geometry; for Geometry has only Two Dimensions." And then I began to shew the boy how a Point by moving through a length of three inches makes a Line of three inches, which may be represented by three; and how a Line of three inches, moving parallel to itself through a length of three inches, makes a Square of three inches every way, which may be represented by three-to-the-second. xxx Upon this, my Grandson, again returning to his former suggestion, took me up rather suddenly and exclaimed, "Well, then, if a Point by moving three inches, makes a Line of three inches represented by three; and if a straight Line of three inches, moving parallel to itself, makes a Square of three inches every way, represented by three-to-the-second; it must be that a Square of three inches every way, moving somehow parallel to itself (but I don't see how) must make Something else (but I don't see what) of three inches every way—and this must be represented by three-to-the-third."

"Go to bed," said I, a little ruffled by this interruption: "if you would talk less nonsense, you would remember more sense.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy)”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“He hadn't wooed her, but had simply claimed her. A gold mine ready to dig. There should have been a period of quiet dinners together, of flowers rather than diamonds, of kisses given after permission to kiss, of a slow awakening that predisposed her to greater intimacies. But no, not the great Alexander Kinross! He had met her, he had married her the next day, and climbed into her bed after one kiss in the church. There to prove himself an animal in her eyes. One mistake after another, that was the story of his relationship with Elizabeth. And Ruby had always meant more.”
― Colleen McCullough, The Touch

“Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”
― Annie Dillard

“labour.”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions—the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.”
― Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Suddenly Nancy spotted the mysterious Arab”
― Carolyn Keene, The Mystery of the 99 Steps

“people diminish me;
the longer I sit and listen to them
the more empty I feel but I don't get
the idea that they feel empty, I feel
that they enjoy the sound from their
mouths.”
― Charles Bukowski, Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems

“The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective guilt theory.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

“quixotic,”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“It's a disgrace to us all! he almost screamed. 'We're letting them take us to our death like sheep to the slaughter!.....at least we could break out of the ghetto, or at least die honourably, not as a stain on the face of history!”
― Władysław Szpilman

“I shall never go back, I said to myself.

A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.

I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.

I had left behind me – what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.

"I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses."

I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Queen

“It doesn’t matter how fast you move, I learned, if you never go anywhere.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“The reference to the Lusitania was obvious enough,” he recalled later, “but personally it never entered my mind for a moment that the Germans would actually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpability of such an act seemed too blatant and raw for an intelligent people to take upon themselves.”
― Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

“It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. “It will be as if he were your mouth,” said God, “and as if you were God to him.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander