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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 34bf194 | all the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America." "How?" Almanzo asked. "Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And E.. | Laura Ingalls Wilder | ||
| 492023a | Mrs Palissey and I tended to have the same conversations over and over and slightly too often. | repetitive | Dick Francis | |
| 754347f | People always kill Caesar. Don't trust anyone. | trust | Dick Francis | |
| 41635c5 | If ever you get invited into someone's home,' my father said (as he had been invited five or six times that morning), 'you go into the sitting-room and you say, "Oh, what an attractive room!" even if you think it's hideous." | politicians politeness | Dick Francis | |
| 6eeba02 | She said several times that Malcollm was a fiend who was determined to destroy his children, and that I was the devil incarnate helping him. She hoped we would both rot in hell. (I thought devils and fiends might flourish there, actually.) | Dick Francis | ||
| d6ac7fe | Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing"? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending." | Lynne Truss | ||
| 4114bea | Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. | Lynne Truss | ||
| e91ecd9 | Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up. | Lynne Truss | ||
| 3a65929 | As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in th.. | Lynne Truss | ||
| c828b53 | the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its." Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant," | Lynne Truss | ||
| 1c2f5e2 | one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort. | Lynne Truss | ||
| c6582ce | Oh yes, sir. There's no doubt about it, sir. The Punctuation Murderer has struck again. | Lynne Truss | ||
| 3a1ac37 | by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll. | Lynne Truss | ||
| 91e5a45 | I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course. | Lynne Truss | ||
| 6f2fb51 | you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation. | Lynne Truss | ||
| acc1e20 | Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it. | Lynne Truss | ||
| 0be3444 | While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it . | punctuation | Lynne Truss | |
| 58c2557 | I do not like to sound discontented neither,' said Pullings, 'nor to crab any ship I belong to; but between you and me, Doctor, between you and me, she is more what we call a floating coffin than a ship. | ship | Patrick O'Brian | |
| c001443 | The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words. | meaning naval navy symbolism | Patrick O'Brian | |
| c681818 | My dear Miss Lamb,' he cried, taking her free hand, 'I hope I see you well. Quite well?' he said earnestly, meaning 'not too much raped? | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 2274cc1 | Since the sheets were half-flown the sails instantly split at the seams, the maintopsail shaking so furiously that the masthead must have gone had not Mowett, the bosun, Bonden, Warley the captain of the maintop and three of his men gone aloft, laid out on the ice-coated yard and cut the sail away close to the reefs. Warley was on the lee yardarm when the footrope gave way under him and he fell, plunging far clear of the side and instantly .. | will-warley aubreyad master-and-commander the-far-side-of-the-world | Patrick O'Brian | |
| 9ba78a5 | It was an operation that Dr. Maturin had carried out at sea before, always in the fullest possible light and therefore on deck, and many of them had seen him do so. | barret-bonden jack-aubrey joe-plaice aubreyad master-and-commander the-far-side-of-the-world stephen-maturin | Patrick O'Brian | |
| 9a152a3 | West was the only officer on the quarterdeck, and it so happened that the party of hands making dolphins and paunch-mats on the forecastle were all Shelmerstonians. West was gaping rather vacantly over the taffrail when he saw an extraordinarily handsome woman ride along the quay, followed by a groom. She dismounted at the height of the ship, gave the groom her reins, and darted straight across the brow and so below. 'Hey there,' he cri.. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 0f5780c | Oh, the odious wench. How I wish I were rid of her. I have always loathed women, from clew to earring; hook, line and sinker; root and branch. I always said this would happen, you remember; I was against it from the start. Damn it for a flibbertigibbet, the hussy. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 66a588a | Almost ready, sir,' said the sweating, harassed bosun. 'I'm working the cunt-splice myself.' 'Well,' said Jack, hurrying off to where the stern-chaser hung poised above the Sophie's quarter-deck, ready to plunge through her bottom if gravity could but have its way, 'a simple thing like a cunt-splice will not take a man of war's bosun long, I believe. | nautical-terminology | Patrick O'Brian | |
| a8907af | It's all along of the unicorn's horn - it's all along of the glorious hand. Huzzay, three times huzzay for the doctor!' Lord, how they cheered their surgeon! It was he who had brought the narwhal's tusk aboard: and the severed hand, the Hand of Glory, was his property: both symbolized (and practically guaranteed) immense good fortune, virility, safety from poison or any disease you chose to name: and both had proved their worth. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| fa11cdd | He reflected on his hitherto reflection that soldiers and sailors were, upon the whole, quite different creatures. 'And perhaps they are, too: yet perhaps drink, in very large quantities, may make the difference less evident. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| e878dbc | The sea has receded!' cried Stephen. 'I am amazed.' 'They tell me it does so twice a day in these parts,' said Jack. 'It is technically known as the tide. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 6451df5 | How wonderfully strange,' he thought, 'to be upset by this trifle; yet I am upset. | stephen-maturin | Patrick O'Brian | |
| bb8257e | Here he found Stephen looking frowsty and discontented - there was nothing that more thoroughly persuaded Jack of his friend's innocence with regard to Mrs Fielding than this three days' beard, this vile old wig - and Stephen said to him 'If the woman does not issue a more Christian invitation in two minutes, I shall drink that,' - pointing to the gunroom's coffee, weak, insipid, only just luke-warm. 'She has asked us to take chocolate with.. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| b0e0ac4 | Another roll like that, and we shall have no masts,' said Pullings, as the remaining crockery, the glasses and the inhabitants of the gun-room all shot over to the lee. 'We'll lose the mizen first, Doctor,' - picking Stephen tenderly out of the wreckage - 'and so we'll be a brig; then we'll lose the foremast, so we'll be a right little old sloop; then we'll lose the main, and we'll be a raft, which is what we ought to have begun as. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 60407ba | I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour. | friends sacrifice friendship jack-aubrey | Patrick O'Brian | |
| e0204e9 | Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham. Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large. | humor maturin jargon nautical | Patrick O'Brian | |
| e5cf665 | A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages.. | mind thinking | Patrick O'Brian | |
| 59b4f0e | Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 61659d2 | What I meant was that if he could induce others to believe what he said, then for him the statement acquired some degree of truth, a reflection of their belief that it was true; and this reflected truth might grow stronger with time and repetition until it became conviction, indistinguishable from ordinary factual truth, or very nearly so. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 96ee213 | It all gave a pleasant illusion of eternity, this quiet sailing under a perfect sky towards a horizon perpetually five miles ahead, never nearer. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 46e9fed | Mr Mowett,' called Stephen in the pause while the table was clearing to make room for the pudding, and pudding-wine--in this case Frontignan and Canary--was handing about, 'you were telling me about your publishers.' 'Yes, sir: I was about to say that they were the most hellish procrastinators--' 'Oh how dreadful,' cried Fanny. 'Do they go to--to special houses, or do they ...' 'He means they delay,' said Babbington. 'Oh. | procrastination | Patrick O'Brian | |
| b79eff9 | all agree that the people are most uncommonly amiable and good-looking, their only faults being cannibalism and unlimited fornication. But neither of these is erected into a religious system, oh no: the divine offerings are invariably swine, the cannibalism being simply a matter of taste or inclination; while the fornication has nothing ceremonial or compulsory about it. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 26e95c0 | Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras - ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much. | friends friendship jack-aubrey | Patrick O'Brian | |
| eddcb84 | I slept as the person in Plutarch that ran from Marathon to Athens without a pause would have slept if he had not fallen dead, the creature. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| b87c6d6 | He cannot hold his wine; he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King's ship, upon my sacred honour! | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 2b6e14d | Perhaps there will be news from home waiting for us there. Lord, how I should love to know how things are going.' 'Oh so should I,' cried Stephen. 'Though it is not yet possible that there should be word of Diana and our daughter. Sometimes when I think of that little soul I grow quite lachrymose.' 'A few months of roaring and bawling and swaddling-clothes will soon cure you of that. You have to be a woman to bear babies.' 'So I have always.. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 0c48ee9 | It makes me wonder which tendencies are decided by birth, and which by desire. | Karen Hawkins |