Tommie Zampedri > Tommie's Quotes

“Once your soil is fertile and weed-free, everything else becomes easier.”
― Charles Dowding, Charles Dowding's Skills for Growing

“Heidi's role as grand master was to monitor all the women and to manage their locations and communication. Even though she’d done this many times on multiple missions, her heartbeat still pounded in her ears.”
― Kirsten Fullmer, Trouble on Main Street

“Once inside my skull, my doctor added some salt, just to taste.  He also poured some fruit into my skull – an apple, a pear, a few seedless grapes, and a ripe banana.  He then used an electric blender set on its highest speed to create what he had termed ‘a yogurt parfait.’  After he finished blending the ingredients, he beckoned the other doctors and a few of the nurses to sample his new concoction.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“ If they come—whoever they are—will sorely wish they hadn’t!”
― Tom Baldwin, Macom Farm

“Rags hate clutter the way healthy people hate cancer: it was offensive, invasive, and should be eliminated quickly and surgically.”
― Amy L. Bernstein, The Potrero Complex

“Happy Birthday, Sweetheart.”
― Kyle Keyes, Under the Bus

“The receiving radio operator immediately said, “Please tell Sunray Delta Six that Sunray Six is being located and informed immediately. Expect his answer very soon!” A short time later, Harry Smith was summoned to the HQ Delta Company radio. He went to it and was told, “Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Townsend is waiting to speak to you.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“The steps leading to the porch looked worn, cracked, and unpainted, ready for a nice hot fire.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow

“Your long-term association with military intelligence is important. Let’s talk about what you might notice in them. Since this happened, one or two may have changed behavioral characteristics. Are there any with peculiarities different from when they started?”
― Karl Braungart, Fatal Identity

“His world closes in. The sky is endless no longer but pieced into squares of brick and bright cloths hanging down to dry. Underfoot, no longer stone but rubble, earth, the peelings and rotted scraps of the inedible. He smells the smoke of cooking fires, he hears men arguing and babies screaming like seagulls, he sees young women looking shyly down from high windows, exchanging glances. Now, he is no longer the watcher. Watched. Shouts echo in the dark between twisted walls and back alleys. A twisted smile in a doorway. A stranger’s voice. A stranger’s language.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“We...we could be friends.'

We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“These problems have been here so long that the only way I’ve been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively.”
― Mark Bowden, Worm: The First Digital World War

“When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“I walked past Malison, up Lower Main to Main and across the road. I didn’t need to look to know he was behind me. I entered Royal Wood, went a short way along a path and waited. It was cool and dim beneath the trees. When Malison entered the Wood, I continued eastward. 
I wanted to place his body in hallowed ground. He was born a Mearan. The least I could do was send him to Loric. The distance between us closed until he was on my heels. He chose to come, I told myself, as if that lessened the crime I planned. He chose what I have to offer.
We were almost to the cemetery before he asked where we were going. I answered with another question. “Do you like living in the High Lord’s kitchens?”
He, of course, replied, “No.”
“Well, we’re going to a better place.”
When we reached the edge of the Wood, I pushed aside a branch to see the Temple of Loric and Calec’s cottage. No smoke was coming from the chimney, and I assumed the old man was yet abed. His pony was grazing in the field of graves. The sun hid behind a bank of clouds.
Malison moved beside me. “It’s a graveyard.”
“Are you afraid of ghosts?” I asked.
“My father’s a ghost,” he whispered.
I asked if he wanted to learn how to throw a knife. He said, “Yes,” as I knew he would.  He untucked his shirt, withdrew the knife he had stolen and gave it to me. It was a thick-bladed, single-edged knife, better suited for dicing celery than slitting a young throat. But it would serve my purpose. That I also knew. I’d spent all night projecting how the morning would unfold and, except for indulging in the tea, it had happened as I had imagined. 
Damut kissed her son farewell. Malison followed me of his own free will. Without fear, he placed the instrument of his death into my hand. We were at the appointed place, at the appointed time. The stolen knife was warm from the heat of his body. I had only to use it. Yet I hesitated, and again prayed for Sythene to show me a different path.
“Aren’t you going to show me?” Malison prompted, as if to echo my prayer.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“She wore people down like waves wore down stone.
Consistent. Patient. Relentless. Merciless.
       ”
― D.L. Maddox, THE DOG WALKER: THE PREQUEL

“Deliverance is not scary—it is the most beautiful, loving act of Jesus. It is the moment someone finally walks into the freedom that was always meant for them.”
― Kathryn Krick, Unlock Your Deliverance: Keys to Freedom From Demonic Oppression

“Mary stared at the dreamlike happenings on the page. Human figures faced each other; the man’s head was a golden ball with rays reaching up to huge stars and out to the distant mountains; the woman’s silver head was sickle-shaped and surrounded by birds like eagles with white beaks. Some of the black letters glowed because they had tips like tiny flames.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“At ground zero, directly beneath the airburst, the temperature reached perhaps 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone on the bridge was incinerated, and hundreds of fires were ignited. The blast wave flattened buildings, a firestorm engulfed the city, and a mushroom cloud rose almost ten miles into the sky. From the plane, Hiroshima looked like a roiling, bubbling sea of black smoke and fire. A small amount of fissile material was responsible for the devastation; 98.62 percent of the uranium in Little Boy was blown apart before it could become supercritical. Only 1.38 percent actually fissioned, and most of that uranium was transformed into dozens of lighter elements. About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Your trouble comes from years of wearing the wrong kind of shoes. - Jake Wexler”
― Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

“I love you forever, my baby you'll be”
― Robert N. Munsch, Love You Forever

“One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“one knee, with a groan, I released my hold upon his throat,”
― Solomon Northup, 12 Years a Slave