Haleh Banani Quotes & Sayings

Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It's because they're in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round. — Alan Bradley

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination. — Mark Twain

At what point did men decide that women are "on the market" to "be picked?" "Pick me! Pick me!" Oh really? Is it really like that? I shall be the one to do the picking, thank you. No one will in any way line me up against the wall and take a pick. Men do not do the picking. Women do the picking. Only stupid women wish to be "picked out." This is the ancient way, this is the way of gods and angels. Women are not "on the market;" women are seated on thrones. — C. JoyBell C.

God created you for the first and greatest commandment, to be a lover of God. — Sam Storms

Hold on," Eli said. He grabbed his phone and dialed Abe again. Abe answered in a more sluggish tone. "What?" "Ask Lovely if kids are like Gremlins. Will they turn if I feed them at night? — Ivy Symone

It doesn't matter how good your film is; if people don't know about it, they won't go and see it. — Robert Kane Pappas

People teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation. — Sherry Turkle

All he wanted was to show her she was worthy of a long journey, worthy of an apology, worthy of love. She didn't have to accept any of it, but she needed to know. — Sarah Sundin

But "ma'am" doesn't translate in the North, where it just startles and offends. — Rob Sheffield

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. — Peter Singer

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. — Bill Bryson