Dilettant Quotes & Sayings

It was all part of growing up. You got these little quick passions, you blinked, and they were gone. You forgave faults, found perfection, fell madly; then the next day the sun came up and it was over. Chalk it up to experience, old girl, and get on with the morning. Buttercup stood, made her bed, changed her clothes, combed her hair, smiled, and burst out again in a fit of weeping. Because there was a limit to just how much you could lie to yourself. — William Goldman

Category:
Inner-space fiction
For there is never anywhere to go but in. — Doris Lessing

If only she could find someone as perfect as her father. He made every other man she'd ever met seem unworthy. Perhaps this was the reason she'd never found a suitor very appealing; she always compared him to her father. — Melanie Dickerson

Force persuades a person to speak, but it cannot guarantee his honesty. Quite the reverse: it will extract confessions from innocents and lies from simple sinners ... — Meredith Duran

We have to be very clear with the population and the countries we enter what we can do and what we cannot do. — Kofi Annan

I knew nothing about love. But it took six kisses to get from his mouth to his ear. Nine, ear to collarbone. Sixteen, collarbone to hipbone. And sometimes, when he was tired, he was ticklish right there in that hollow. No, I knew nothing about love. But I swear all I wanted to do for the rest of my life was lie on his chest, stealing his warmth, feeling him trace shapes into my hip. I wanted to slip my fingers in between his. There were seventeen scars on his hands. I wanted to know the story of every last one. — Jessica Gadziala

With unerring African instinct, the negroes had all discovered that Gerald had a loud bark and no bite at all, and they took shameless advantage of him. — Margaret Mitchell

So it is that whenever Heaven invests a person with great responsibilities, it first tries his resolve, exhausts his muscles and bones, starves his body, leaves him destitute, and confound his every endeavor. In this way his patience and endurance are developed, and his weaknesses are overcome. We change and grow only when we make mistakes. We realize what to do only when we work through worry and confusion. And we gain people's trust and understanding only when our inner thoughts are revealed clearly in our faces and words. — Mencius

There is an of-quoted passage in Walden, in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It's a thrilling sentiment - one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heavens your star resides — Amor Towles

I remember one spring when I was doing the team's telecasts, Bob Allison was with me, and we were walking through the clubhouse in Orlando. This kid who was trying to make it with the Twins as an outfielder came up to me and asked who was that with me. I said that's Bob Allison, and you better hope you have as good a career as he had. — Harmon Killebrew

I feel like I'm playing more of a role walking down the red carpet than when I'm playing an ordinary woman covered in sweat. — Kate Winslet