Rosella Hudgeons > Rosella's Quotes

“The footpath curves right, and my home’s roof ridge is visible through the coconut fronds. A streak of happiness lights up in my heart. I know it’s just a building, but I hear its frantic call, reaching out to me like a mother cow that has lost its calf. Is this what differentiates a home from a house—the life in the former, the soul breathed in by my grandparents, my parents, and me?”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Every night I dream a lot. Every day I live a little.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“Cindy, have you heard of the second law of thermodynamics?”
“Yes. Something about heat energy can never be created or destroyed?”
“That’s the first law of thermodynamics. The second one is this…all organized systems tend to slide slowly into chaos and disorder. Energy tends to run down. The universe itself heads inevitably towards darkness and stasis. Our own star system eventually will die, the sun will become a red giant, and the earth will be swallowed by the red giant.”
“Cheery thought.”
“But mathematics has altered this concept; rather one particular mathematician. His name was Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian mathematician.”
“Who and what does that have to do with your being a PI and a great psychologist?”
“Are you being sarcastic? Of course you are. Anyway, what I was trying to say was that Prigogine used the analogy of a walled city and open city. The walled city is isolated from its surroundings and will run down, decay, and die. The open city will have an exchange of materials and energy with its surroundings and will become larger and more complex; capable of dissipating energy even as it grows. So my point is, this analogy very much pertains to a certain female. The walled person versus the open person. The walled person will eventually decline, fade, and decay.”
― Behcet Kaya, Appellate Judge

“It does little good to regret a choice. So often people say, “If only I had known,” implying they would’ve acted differently in a given situation. It is true that desires of the moment can blind one’s sight of the future. Revenge is not as sweet as the adage claims. Yet who could pass a chance to taste it? And if the chance were allowed to slip by, would the fool regret his lack of action? ”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“So, you do speak English. That makes sense now.” Catherine said, shaking her head.

“Of course, I speak English. I’m from Australia, not Tanzania.”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“It is weird that the same two parents can come together and make two such different people.”
― Sara Pascoe, Weirdo: 'Intense, also BRILLIANT, funny and forensically astute.' Marian Keyes

“there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius: from the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius

“Well . . . sure good to be together again. Arguing. Almost dying. Abject terror. Oh, look. It's our floor.”
― Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian

“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The search for God begins at the point of need.”
― Catherine Marshall, Something More : In Search of a Deeper Faith

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.”
― Aldo Leopold

“What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic though passion…if no one loved, the sun would go out.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“At the still point, there the dance is.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Bill.' If you don't, I'll do this," and with that he gave me a twitch that I thought would have made me faint. Between this and that, I was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice. The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the rum went out of him and left him staring sober. The expression of his face was not so much of terror as of mortal sickness. He made a movement to rise, but I do not believe he had enough force left in his body. "Now, Bill, sit where you are," said the beggar. "If I can't see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is business. Hold out your left hand. Boy, take his left hand by the wrist and bring it near to my right." We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass something from the hollow of the hand that held his stick into the palm of the captain's, which closed upon it instantly. "And now that's done," said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy and nimbleness, skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood motionless, I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance. It was some time before either I or the captain seemed to gather our senses, but at length, and about at the same moment, I released his wrist, which I was still holding, and he drew in his hand and looked sharply into the palm. "Ten o'clock!" he cried. "Six hours. We'll do them yet," and he sprang to his feet. Even as he did so, he reeled, put his hand to his throat, stood swaying for a moment, and then, with a peculiar sound, fell from his whole height face foremost to the floor. I ran to him at once, calling to my mother. But haste was all in vain. The captain had been struck dead by thundering apoplexy. It is a curious thing to understand, for I had certainly never liked the man, though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears. It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart. 4 The Sea-chest I LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and dangerous position. Some of the man's money—if he had any—was certainly due to us, but it was not likely that our captain's shipmates, above all the two specimens seen by me, Black Dog and the blind beggar, would be inclined to give up their booty in payment of the dead man's debts. The captain's order to mount at once and ride for Doctor Livesey would have left my mother alone and unprotected, which was not to be thought of. Indeed, it seemed impossible for either of us to remain much longer in the house; the fall of coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the clock, filled us with alarms. The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror. Something must speedily be resolved upon, and it occurred to us at last to go forth together and seek help in the neighbouring hamlet. No sooner said than done. Bare-headed as we were, we ran out at once in the gathering evening and the frosty fog. The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his appearance and whither he had presumably returned. We were not many minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each other and hearken. But there was no unusual sound—nothing but the low wash of the ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

“Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows.”
― Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

“Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of having a gimp leg. When he saw, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps towards us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank down on her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood.
It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. "You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel," she said. "And thank me, too."
Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it. I was the one who'd saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel. No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arms around my shoulders.
"There weren't no guardian angel, Dad," I said. I started explaining how I'd gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them.
Dad squeezed my shoulder. "Well, darling," he said, "maybe the angel was you.”
― Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses

“but fact is, it’s been years since I even really liked someone. So how likely is it I’ll meet someone I love, much less someone I love enough to marry? I’m tired of not knowing who I’ll be with, or if I’ll be with anyone.”
― Gillian Flynn

“...so when you didn't mention marriage again I assumed that you had been talking idly, the way men do when they're feeling romantic.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“The soft humidity of the evening, so pleasant to walk about in earlier, had turned to rain. The strolling tourists had melted away. One or two people hurried by under umbrellas. This is what the inhabitants who live here see, he thought. This is the true life. Empty streets by night, the dank stillness of a stagnant canal beneath shuttered houses. The rest is a bright façade put on for show, glittering by sunlight.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now and Other Stories

“Personally, I concluded that no place in the world was entirely safe for an African, and that for many of us, survival depended on perpetual migration.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“I absolutely think that happiness is a choice. One of the most potent forces in human psychology is the power of habit. Do something, think something, often enough and it will become the only thing you can do or think. Choose to be unhappy and soon that’s all you will be. Live in a swamp and you’ll grow webbed feet.”
― Nicholas Evans

“mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“In that moment of truce, of utter surrender, when the rabbit still alive offers no resistance but only waits, is it possible that the rabbit also loves the owl?”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“If a person is plagued by religious doubts,as many are in their youth, he takes to persecuting unbelievers; if troubled by love, he turns it into marriage; and when overcome by some other enthusiasm, he takes refuge from the impossibility of living constantly in its fire by beginning to live for that fire. That is, he fills the many moments of his day, each of which needs a content and an impetus, not with his ideal state but with the many ways of achieving it by overcoming obstacles and incidents which guarantees that he will never need to attain it. For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“He glared at her. "Aye, and you shall be the best cabin boy I have ever had or I will feed you to the sharks. Savvy?" He turned and stomped back to the
ship”
― Bev Stout, Secrets of the Realm

“If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards getting it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Bathing is even more embarrassing, because I have to strip down to my birthday suit in front of a nurse. Now, there are some things that never die, so even though I'm in my nineties my sap sometimes rises. I can't help it. They always pretend not to notice. They're trained that way, I suppose, although pretending not to notice is almost worse than noticing. It means they consider me nothing more than a harmless old man sporting a harmless old penis that still gets uppity once in a while. Although if one of them took it seriously and tried to do something about it, the shock would probably kill me.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants