Ricklefs 1997 Quotes & Sayings

Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person. — Hilary Mantel

By granting to the senators the privilege of being chosen for several years, and being renewed seriatim, the law takes care to preserve in the legislative body a nucleus of men already accustomed to public business, and capable of exercising a salutary influence upon the junior members. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Your gift for thinking interferes with you: without it, of course, you'd be happy. — Gaito Gazdanov

I don't care what a man is. I mean, a great artist is like a great doctor. I don't care how racist he is. If he can show me how to operate on a heart so that I can cure a brother, or cure someone else, I don't give a damn what the man thinks; he has taught me something. And that is valuable to me. And that is valuable to others and man as a whole. — Ernest J. Gaines

Arin, are you all right?"
"How?" He managed. "How did her arm break?"
"She fell of a ladder."
He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold.
"I imagined something worse," he tried to explain.
She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just and accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you. — Marie Rutkoski

My chair just broke by the way. It's a billion dollar corporation and I can't get a decent chair and somebody to come out here and fix this announce table. — CM Punk

She fixed things that were broken, and then began fixing things that weren't broken, or broke things so they could be fixed in ways no one understood or found particularly convenient. — Jordan Stratford

I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing. — Sarah Miller

Divinity of art, it's such a mystery. How to convince people that no matter how much money you can spend on education and art education especially, that it implants, it directs a young person for the rest of their lives, and always in the most humane and positive and dignified manner. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

The last time the firemen came to the house, they said the only thing I was allowed to cook from here on out was cereal with milk." Nothing could have stopped his chuckle. "Well then, I guess you'd better leave if you're expecting sustenance." "I'm sure I could find something else to eat." She practically purred the words in his ear. Surely that unmanly "eep" didn't come from him? — Eve Langlais

I grew up in the age of radio. That was my main boyhood form of entertainment: lying on the living room floor with my ears affixed to the radio. I loved shows like 'The Phantom,' 'Cisco Kid,' and even 'Happy Theater' when I was younger. — George Takei

I'm always in a state of trance, I'm not very often in the real world. — Emma Hewitt

I hate the whole concept of the clog! It's fake, it's ugly, and it's not even comfortable! — Christian Louboutin