Pargeter Quotes & Sayings

Waspish tongues often go with plain faces. — Margaret Pargeter

Not his match! And have you not the heart in you to be anything but best? How many are his match? How many in this world do you think stand in the front rank? Are all the rest of us to give up and sit on our hands rather than serve humbly where we deserve? — Edith Pargeter

He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time. — Edith Pargeter

The day Chess Pargeter looks t' engage himself with any woman's situation'll be a cold one in the Hot Place for sure — Gemma Files

Yeah, that's right, Doc: I'm Chess Pargeter, he's Ed Morrow-this is a gun, so's this. Now, I'm just gonna go outside and kill that big bastard, and if I come back in here and find Ed ain't been fixed in the interim, you best believe I will end you. Got that? — Gemma Files

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years. — Gregory Benford

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered. — Samuel Butler

He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker, but he never in his whole life had any talent for making money. — John Steinbeck

...but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way. — David Sedaris

This new approach, it seemed, was not to be made so publicly, not to be exposed to the expedient treason of little devious minds far removed from the battlefields on which honest men met, and contended, and killed one another without malice. — Edith Pargeter

People's association with improvisation means one person playing an endless stream of notes over something, and it doesn't have to be. — Jon Brion

In a revolutionary age talk of equality may well have represented a passion to provide full human dignity to those who had previously been denied it by systems of political and economic domination; but in the present age it softens the spiritual requirements that are an essential ingredient in human dignity. Thus the slogans of equality serve not so much to elevate individuals to the dignity of being human as to free them from the responsibility of rising to this vocation. — Merold Westphal

Learn humility, while there's yet time
': those were the last of the abbot's words he had waited to hear. All very well, he thought, to be humble in accepting one's own pain and deprivation, perhaps, but what right have I, what right has he, to make a virtue of meekness when it will be Adam who suffers? I call that cheap humility. — Edith Pargeter

A dead eagle he might have buried, but he had chosen rather to light a fire for a phoenix. — Edith Pargeter

What is there," Owain wondered aloud, to the sky above him and the soil below, "persuades this man still that my words do not mean what they seem to mean in sane men's ears? — Edith Pargeter

Say what you want to say about the rest of his presidency, including his tone-deaf response to Katrina and a war waged in Iraq on false pretenses, Bush connected with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 because he looked as frail and unforgiving as we felt. — Ron Fournier

Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the hour held just as much or more importance to us as the newspaper that usually went from doorstep to garbage bin unread, and we speculated about the future lives of the characters that populated decayed mansions or desert isles as if they weren't inventions of other human minds. — Dexter Palmer

Well, do as you think best. That's every man's right and duty. But for me, I pledge you now I will not surrender one grain of my rights. What I took, I took and by God, I'll keep it, too. Take her home tomorrow, Archie, and never look back to watch what I do, for you know it before. I would not give him one knigh who had confided himself to me and none other, much less you. Only over my dead body," said Hotspur hardily, eye to eye with the friend he had made under Homildon Hill, "will King Henry ever claim you as his prisoner. — Edith Pargeter

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death. — Chris Hedges