Bonessential Select Quotes & Sayings

Your face looks like a sack of purple potatoes — Jim Butcher

I don't want you to describe to me - not ever - what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand. — John Irving

Patience is the courage of virtue. — Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre

And she could hear a sound, rising steadily, not in steps like a scale, but in a slow glissando, and not quite a violin or a voice, but somewhere in between, rising and rising unbearably, without ever leaving the audible range, a violin-voice that was just on the edge of making sense, telling her something urgent in sibilants and vowels more primitive than words. It may have been inside the room, or out in the corridor, or only in her ears, like tinnitus. She may even have been making the noise herself. She did not care - she had to get out. — Ian McEwan

It is universally allowed that, though nothing can be more interesting in itself than the conversation of two lovers, yet nothing can be more insipid in detail - just as the heavenly fragrance of the rose becomes vapid and sickly under all the attempts made to retain and embody its exquisite odor. — Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

So the fire and its subsequent flood, wich destroyed everything left that was not flammable and added a particularly noisome flux to the survivors'problems, did not mark its end. Rather it was a fiery punctuation mark, a coal-like comma, or salamander semicolon, in a continuing story. — Terry Pratchett

clearing and into the — Susanna Kearsley

I photographed Arthur Coble and his sons Milton and Darrel as they did chores, but the vicious winds made it difficult to see and breathe. — Arthur Rothstein

So it's Alice's fault that I never invested the appropriate time worrying about infertility. I never insured against it by worrying about it. I won't make that mistake again. Now every day I remember to worry that Ben will die in a car accident on his way to work. I make sure I worry at regular intervals about Alice's children - ticking off every terrible childhood disease: meningitis, leukemia. Before I go to sleep at night I worry that someone I love will die in the night. Every morning I worry that somebody I know will be killed in a terrorist attack that day. That means the terrorists have won, Ben tells me. He doesn't understand that I'm fighting off the terrorists by worrying about them. It's my own personal War on Terror. That — Liane Moriarty

Every time I got drunk, this girl named Nikki would show up. When I got drunk, I was just a different person. This is a totally different person than Lisa. When these two started to battle it out, I had to create a third person to come in and straighten the two of them out. Nina, my evil twin who came from within, who I blame my sins on. (satanic alter) All the problems I did have stemmed from what I was doing - I was creating all these different personalities. — Lisa Lopes

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble. — Henry Miller

Read to your children Twenty minutes a day; You have the time, And so do they. Read while the laundry is in the machine; Read while the dinner cooks; Tuck a child in the crook of your arm And reach for the library books. Hide the remote, Let the computer games cool, For one day your children will be off to school; Remedial? Gifted? You have the choice; Let them hear their first tales In the sound of your voice. Read in the morning; Read over noon; Read by the light of Goodnight Moon. Turn the pages together, Sitting close as you'll fit, Till a small voice beside you says, Hey, don't quit. — Richard Peck