Roundels Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer's body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and a brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. — Hilary Mantel

If solitude deprives of the benefit of advice, it also excludes from the mischief of flattery. But the absence of others' applause is generally supplied by the flattery of one's own breast. — William Benton Clulow

There are certain topicks which are never exhausted. Of some images and sentiments the mind of man may be said to be enamoured; it meets them, however often they occur, with the same ardour which a lover feels at the sight of his mistress, and parts from them with the same regret when they can no longer be enjoyed. — Samuel Johnson

I think anyone that isn't fired up right now shouldn't probably be out here. — Karrie Webb

Two hundred years from now, she had - I will? she thought wildly - stood in front of this portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, furiously denying the truth that it showed. Ellen MacKenzie looked out at her now as she had then; long-necked and regal, slanted eyes showing a humor that did not quite touch the tender mouth. It wasn't a mirror image, by any means; Ellen's forehead was high, narrower than Brianna's, and the chin was round, not pointed, her whole face somewhat softer and less bold in its features. But the resemblance was there, and pronounced enough to be startling; the wide cheekbones and lush red hair were the same. And around her neck was the string of pearls, gold roundels bright in the soft spring sun. — Diana Gabaldon

Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? Does it improve upon the silence? — Mona Simpson

Have they [the agnostics] produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few roundels. Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. — G.K. Chesterton

I have the nicest life in the world. — Alan Bean

I regret what happened. I saw no other possibility to achieve my goal. It was not hooliganism. — Mathias Rust

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos. — Charles Bukowski

I generally play villains once every three or four years by choice because I get offered villainous roles a lot, because of the way I look and whatever. And I tend to avoid them because I think you can end up in a cul-de-sac of your own making if you're cast in that. — Kevin McKidd

Even my players aren't players. — Casey Stengel

When authorities learned that Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. — Bill Bryson