Miscellanies Quotes & Sayings

The thing I truly object to," Kitty said, "and I know this sounds trivial and I don't care if it sounds a bit snobbish, but I don't care about these awful people and I do care about this. It's that the whole world now thinks about Hanmouth as being this sort of awful council estate and nothing else, and Hanmouth people like this awful Heidi and Micky people. Absolutely everything you read in the papers is about how they live in Hanmouth and, frankly, they don't. They live on the Ruskin estate where I've never been and I hope never to go anywhere near. — Philip Hensher

Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills, - with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance, - the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment, - that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies. — Rabindranath Tagore

The appetites of the body were private battles. — Elizabeth Strout

Like every writer, he measured other men's virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jean Louise grinned. Her father said it took at least five years to learn law after one left law school: one practiced economy for two years, learned Alabama Pleading for two more, reread the Bible and Shakespeare for the fifth. Then one was fully equipped to hold on under any conditions. — Harper Lee

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style. — Jonathan Swift

Fragrance takes you on a journey of time. You can walk down the street and pass someone and get taken back 20 years. It's very Proustian that way. — Daphne Guinness

After that, he tried to go upstairs through the broom cupboard, and then the yard. This seemed to puzzle him a little. But finally he discovered the stairs, all except the bottom on, and fell up them on his face. The whole castle shook. — Diana Wynne Jones

Neither the dissipations of the past
and she had lived very much in the world, nor the restrictions of the present; neither sickness nor sorrow seemed to have closed her heart or ruined her spirits. — Jane Austen

Esther always avoided asking questions of Lydley, who found an answer as she found a key, by pouring out a pocketful of miscellanies. — George Eliot