Alexander The Terrible Quotes & Sayings

It was a good thing to be an African. There were terrible things that happened in Africa, things that brought shame and despair when one thought about them, but that was not all there was in Africa. However great the suffering of the people of Africa, however harrowing the cruelty and chaos brought about by soldiers - small boys with guns, really - there was still so much in Africa from which one could take real pride. There was the kindness, for example, and the ability to smile, and the art and the music. — Alexander McCall Smith

The professor's motive was in the grand scheme of things terribly petty " Greenwood said. ""Pilate's Cross" is inspired by the questions this terrible crime created but as a work of fiction it is set in a different place and time and has a more complex motive for the murders. — J. Alexander Greenwood

Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus. — Alexander McCall Smith

Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin. — Alexander Chee

The world of the stage and the performance on the stage usually does not tend to translate very well - it doesn't tend to hold very well - once cameras are on it; it's not like it's terrible or embarrassing or bad anything, but, I, as an actor, would perform a role differently for an audience than I would for just cameras. — Jason Alexander

In this world, some time ago, far past anyone's remembering,women as a kind had done something so terrible, so awful, so fantastically cruel that they and their daughters and their daughters' daughters were forever beyond forgiveness until the end of time- unforgiving, distrusted, enslaved, made to suffer for the least offenses committed against any man. What was remembered were the terms of our survival as a class: We were to be docile, beautiful,uncomplaining, pure, and failing that at the least useful.bin return we might be allowed something like a long life. But if we were not any of these things, but a man's reckoning, or if perchance we violated their sense of that pact, we would have no protection whatsoever and were to be treated worse than any wild dog or lame horse. — Alexander Chee

What is this you write- 'Come home? Surely now, in our terrible dearth of workers, it is not the time for any one to desert his post. Send us only our first twenty men and I may be tempted to come to help you to find the second twenty. — Alexander Murdoch Mackay

Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment. — Alexander McCall Smith

And struggles to understand. But - again, paradoxically - Om is "human" as well - even more human than you and I are. Om understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly and personally than we can even imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment. — Eben Alexander

We the erratic keep terrible time. — Alexander Maksik

Peter to Austin: Here are the facts, Austin. You've been engaged four times.
You've cheated on every single one of them. You're cruel
sometimes and superficial and spoiled and really fucked up
emotionally. You talk about my being inscrutable, but you treat
nothing as if it matters to you. Something terrible happens? You
make a joke and shrug it off. You feel too much? You get angry
and lash out at me. So no, I'm not in love with you. I'm fighting
it every fucking step! I just wish I could stop it. — Dani Alexander

After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag - the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition. — David Levering Lewis

There is nobody more terrible than the desperate. — Alexander Suvorov

I'd been so set on an escape that was now impossible, and the only form of freedom left to me was death. It was a terrible kind of freedom - one from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything. — Alexander Gordon Smith

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world. — Alexander McCall Smith

Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently. You bear terrible thoughts; it is almost painful to be near you. At the same time it is enticing. Do you know why? — Ingmar Bergman

I would never inflict my bassoon on anybody really other than the long suffering audiences that come to the concerts of The Really Terrible Orchestra; which actually is really terrible. — Alexander McCall Smith

Are you slow-witted? I'm so sorry for you. It's terrible to be dull and stupid. — Lloyd Alexander

Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment. Anna — Jill Alexander Essbaum

If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity. — Alexander H. Stephens

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means "dead hand." Its definition is: "The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present." (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning. — James Alexander Thom

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another. — Alexander Theroux