Some Marvelous Quotes & Sayings

It's marvelous when you visit Tokyo: they have these clubs, and they'll have 'Motown Night' or 'The Beatles - Totally Authentic and Live!' You know it's shrunk, but at least there's some sort of youthful figure to it. Whereas, the blues scene in Europe is more like, 'Here we go again.' — Robert Palmer

Love may be harder to find in some people, but when they do love you know it must be something marvelous. — Criss Jami

Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey. — Glen Cook

I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water. — Susan Orlean

There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you. — Richard Adams

Having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern ... Two contrary emotions arose in me: fear and desire
fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it. — Leonardo Da Vinci

If ever I feel I might be able to tackle it, I'd love to try holding a spear or something in the theater, or opening a door, or anything, just to try it, you know, because it must be some marvelous magic thing. — Hayley Mills

A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are blameless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful. — Garrison Keillor

My sons served excellent missions, and returned to participate in college athletics. In their letters home, and even now that they have been back for some time, they frequently mention that the experiences in the mission field were the choicest and most gratifying of their lives. You young men, begin to prepare yourselves now for this marvelous experience. — LaVell Edwards

I wished that the chains would break and the wind would sweep me up, up, up into the sky, beyond the clouds, beyond the sun and the moon, to some marvelous kingdom where no one ever changed and friends were friends for life. — Mary Downing Hahn

I've had some marvelous parts, but I'm also asked to play characters who are kind of superficial people. — Holland Taylor

Together, on his back porch, his cigarette smoke rising like incense to the heavens, we spoke to the God of grace we both are so grateful to know up close and personal. It may be the most beautiful prayer I've ever heard. Jesus, for some reason you've given us another day, and you've set us in Narnia. There are people who still think it's frozen, and there are people who are longing to be thawed but don't know it. God, I pray that what you've called us to do would be the subversive work of the kingdom, that we would help participate in the melting of Narnia, and that people would come alive and would drink and dance and sing and just celebrate life in ways that are so marvelous that the world would press its face against the glass and see the redeemed celebrate life. Amen. — Cathleen Falsani

Like a genial hotelier, Rolex has introduced me to some of the nicest people. I ask about their Rolex and they ask about mine. It's as marvelous a conversation piece as it is a timepiece. — Maurice Chevalier

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real? — Robertson Davies

And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. — Roberto Bolano

God will probably allow us to ask questions about and discover some of the things we've always been curious about. Isn't it marvelous to think about how we will be able to actually meet and talk to people who lived throughout history? — David Berg

TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. — Howard Zinn

It's a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you're never bothered by the noise the water makes by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild. — Banana Yoshimoto

...the book typographer's job was building a window between the reader inside a room and that landscape which is the author's words. He may put up a stained glass window of marvelous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be look at, not through. — Simon Garfield

With an admittedly goofy spring in his step, he made his way across the main hall to the breakfast room, pausing only to peek through the sitting room at the large window, which some enterprising footman had pulled open to let in the warm, spring air. What a day, what a day. Birds were chirping, the sky was blue, the grass was green (as always, but it was still an excellent thing), and he had kissed Miss Wynter.
He nearly bounced right off his feet, just thinking about it.
It had been splendid. Marvelous. A kiss to deny all previous kisses. Really, he didn't know what he'd been doing with all those other women, because whatever had happened when his lips had touched theirs, those had not been kisses.
Not like last night. — Julia Quinn

Everything have something overall, everything says something about something about something, like the words the new you check out this word and you must check out this word because you don't know it and then you must this and this...
The same is here, there is some kind a string, but who will find the rope??
Who will pull the rope, who will remove this invisible wall which blocks the incrediable and spectacular stuff? — Deyth Banger

I don't have many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don't mean that in a sad and lonely way; I'm just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I'm good with words, but not spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that's what I do, for I've hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two. — Kate Morton

The writer Lee Smith, who once had a New York copy editor query in the margin of her manuscript "Double-wide what?" tells a perfectly marvelous, spot-on story about Eudora Welty when she came to Hollins College, where Smith was a student. Welty read a short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake. In the back of the audience Smith noted a group of leather-elbowed, goatee-sporting PhD candidates, all of whom were getting pretty excited. One started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, "Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine, the yin and the yang, the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?" Smith reported that Welty looked at him from the lectern without saying anything for a while. Finally she replied mildly, "Well, you see, it's a recipe that's been in my family for some time. — Sally Mann

[Wild animals], and the beautiful landscapes that sustain them ... possess a value and a virtue regardless of our dwindling connection with them. It seems that there is a virtue and a wisdom in keeping some things beyond our reach: that the protection of wilderness itself is imperative ... We have touched, and are consuming, everything. The world is very old, and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe
what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe'
in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does. — Rick Bass

I had always been an atheist until I met Lenny. He was too wonderously complex and good for there to be no benevolent and intelligent force behind our marvelous cosmos. Lenny gave me the actual proof my fiercely skeptical mind had always demanded. Not some logical, 37-step proof of God's existence. It was a personal proof. And it was irrefutable. — Zack Love

The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the right side of my body soon returned. Only the language centers had been damaged beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language - but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo; — Dan Simmons

And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together - year after year - for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable' - is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner - or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom - or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room - waiting to be discovered! — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us. — Kenneth L. Pike

When I compare life to a dream I do not mean to denigrate it as some sort of meaningless fantasy. Life is too wonderful to be called an "illusion" unless we whisper the word in amazement, as we might when witnessing the most astonishing magic trick. What could be more magnificent than this glorious universe, in all its multifarious extravagance? Its awesome vastness and delicate detail. Its impersonal precision and intimate intensity. Its harsh necessities and lush sensuality. This dream of life is truly marvelous. — Timothy Freke

Even the girl he'd danced with had thought it was some marvelous trick. She had been enveloped in real, bright fire and she had tipped back her head and laughed, the tumble of her black hair becoming a crackling waterfall of light, the heels of her shoes striking sparks like glittering leaping dust all over the floor, her skirt trailing flame as if he were following a phoenix tail. Magnus had spun and swung with her, and she'd thought he was marvelous for a single moment of bright illusion.
But, like love, fire didn't last. — Cassandra Clare

You're looking so well, darling. You really are. They've done a marvelous job. I don't know what sort of cream they've put on you down at the morgue, but I want some. Honestly, you look better than you have in years. You look like you're alive! — Wes Anderson

There are many who think that they are marvelous if they can simply resemble a great man in some one thing; and often they seize only on the defect he has. — Baldassare Castiglione

So, what did you think of the Unseelie Court?"
A slow, wicked smile spread on his face. "Oh, Kaye," he breathed. "It was marvelous. It was perfect."
She narrowed her gaze. "I was joking. They were killing things, Corny. For fun. Things like us."
He didn't seem to hear her, his eyes looking past her to the bright window. "There was this knight, not yours. He ... " Corny shivered and seemed to abruptly change the direction of his sentence. "He had a cloak all lined with thorns."
"I saw him talking to the Queen," Kaye said.
Corny shrugged off his jacket. There were long scratches along his arms.
"What happened to you?"
Corny's smile widened, but his gaze was locked in some memory. He shifted it back to her. "Well, obviously I got inside the cloak."
She snorted. "What a euphemism. — Holly Black

I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?
You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?
Yes.
It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous.
Such as?
Be not in haste, said the tortoise.
There is nothing here but time.
If you live long enough, you will see.
Of course, though, you will see them from your cage.
Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here?
The tortoise chuckled.
The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in.
What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough?
Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough.
How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked. — Patrick Jennings

I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me. — Vladimir Nabokov

My plea is that as we continue our search for truth, particularly we of the Church, that we look for strength and goodness rather than weakness and failings in those who did so great a work in their time. We recognize that our forefathers were human. They doubtless made mistakes. Some of them acknowledged making mistakes. But the mistakes were minor when compared with the marvelous work which they accomplished. — Gordon B. Hinckley

And so it continued all day, wynde after wynde, from a room beyond came the whistle of a teakettle. Now, you really must join me. I've some marvelous Darjeeling, and some delicious petits fours a friend of mine gave me for Christmas. — Martha Grimes

There are a thousand beautiful things behind that look. A marvelous sort of ache that only a few people know about. Some miraculous sort of sorrow she's managed to walk away from. — Travis Thrasher

Passion - and humor will permit all of us to do some marvelous things. — Zig Ziglar

I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can't, and you hate yourself because you can't, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God's help you can command your will when you can't command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn't appear to agree with us. — Elizabeth Goudge

One should be wary, however, of the conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvelous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes. There is some truth in this view, but since the early nineteenth century it has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue. — Thomas Piketty

We had some marvelous outtakes, but the producer had destroyed them all. — Alan Young

But what most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones. — Alexis De Tocqueville

To me there is a name for each person. I think it's marvelous to have a name. A woman is not a woman. It's either Gena or my mother or some other person. — John Cassavetes

You know how much Annie loved pearls. She owned some incomparable specimens ... the most marvelous, I believe, that ever existed. You also remember the almost physical joy, the carnal ecstasy, with which she adorned herself with them. Well, when she was sick that passion became a mania with her ... a fury, like love! All day long she loved to touch them, caress them and kiss them; she made cushions of them, necklaces, capes, cloaks. Then this extraordinary thing happened; the pearls died on her skin: first they tarnished, little by little ... little by little they grew dim, and no light was reflected in their luster any more and, in a few days, tainted by the disease, they changed into tiny balls of ash. They were dead, dead like people, my darling. Did you know that pearls had souls? I think it's fascinating and delicious. And since then, I think of it every day. — Octave Mirbeau

Maybe this is just some stupid romantic South American idea, but I need you to understand-darling, for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let's enjoy this time. It's marvelous. Felipe-Eat, Pray, Love — Elizabeth Gilbert

[On the metaphysical:] ... I knew in some marvelous way I had touched the hem of the unknown. And being me, I wanted to lift that hemline a little bit more. — Mae West

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.
Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large. — Howard Kerr

Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale") — John Berwick Harwood

Doubtless almost any intense emotion may open our 'inward eye' to the beauty of reality. Falling in love appears to do it for some people. The beauties of nature or the exhilaration of artistic creation does it for others. Probably any high experience may momentarily stretch our souls up on tiptoe, so that we catch a glimpse of that marvelous beauty which is always there, but which we are not often tall enough to perceive. — Margaret Prescott Montague

The way of the gospel is a simple way. Some of the requirements may appear to you as elementary and unnecessary. Do not spurn them. Humble yourselves and walk in obedience. I promise that the results that follow will be marvelous to behold and satisfying to experience. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene. — Emma Donoghue

I believe that some of my best images have [the] ambiguity which is an essence of life. In this sense I am not interested in trying desperately to make Art but I am interested in relating to the marvelous extravagance of Life. — John Gutmann

Well," the Marsh King pursed his beak politely, "at any rate, your manliness need only last for a relatively brief period. I have already discussed this in detail with some of the lower Stars - white dwarfs and the like. I shall bundle you up tight as a mitten in a human skin until," and here he cleared his long blue throat dramatically, "the Virgin is devoured, the sea turns to gold, and the saints migrate west on the wings of henless eggs."
"In the Stars' name, what does that mean?" I gasped.
"I haven't the faintest idea! Isn't it marvelous? Oracles always have the best poetry! I only repeated what I was told - it is rather rude of you to expect magic, prophecy, and interpretation. That's asking quite a lot, even from a King. — Catherynne M Valente

Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away - just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings - they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so - breaking lines of force, someone's. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there - no. I don't believe that. Words never went on in there. — Anne Carson

We're sending you best wishes
And hope your day goes well
And that you'll find some memories
With stories you can tell
Of how you had a marvelous time
And those around you too
With fun and lots of laughter
And all this just for you..
Have a Very Happy Birthday — Janet Horne

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-colored pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapors; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the black end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Dead strangers evoked a smorgasbord of the lesser emotions and served as marvelous educational tools, warnings, and veiled threats. When an acquaintance was killed, it was closer to home; one knew some of the threads that tied the deceased to a common humanity. Without enough real connection to grieve, one was left in an uncomfortable place between curiosity and embarrassment. — Nevada Barr

I've learned that when you get to be a certain age, you can get away with saying a lot of things, some of which wouldn't even be remotely funny if someone forty years younger said them. The Golden Girls ran for years off the same theory and basically used the same four jokes for seven marvelous seasons. — George Takei

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition. — N. Scott Momaday

Since most law-abiding citizens had no contact with the parole system, it was not a priority with the state legislatures. And since most of the state's prisoners were either poor or black, and unable to use the system to their advantage, it was easy to hit them with harsh sentences and keep them locked up. But for an inmate with a few connections and some cash, the parole system was a marvelous labyrinth of contradictory laws that allowed the Parole Board to pass out favors. — John Grisham