Cadence Woodland > Cadence's Quotes

“What fresh hell is this?”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train

“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
― Mark Twain

“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody. ”
― Jane Austen

“The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.”
― Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

“I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
― Agatha Christie, Peril at End House

“Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory---let the theory go.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“London and Fog! When these two come together, it is time to be a writer!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.

It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody”
― John Lanchesterter

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”
― Angela Carter

“I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“London is on the whole the most possible form of life.”
― Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The Authoritative and Definitive Edition

“For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!!... My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them.”
― Charles Dickens

“To a lover of books the shops and sales in London present irresistible temptations.”
― Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life

“These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula