Startlingly Fresh Quotes & Sayings

But even now, a full century after he wrote his first school poem, scratched out in startlingly plain words on onion skin paper with a number two pencil, his heart and soul remain as fresh and brave as ever. Hemingway lives. — Clancy Sigal

No matter what the bards may say, there's no romance in dying for a man. — Susanna Kearsley

Sartre, in his memoirs, confessed to much the same experience. Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given for a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled, mediated, still formidable. — Alberto Manguel

soon he'll reach for her because she's beautiful, and she's his wife. If she cringes away from him because you've convinced her he isn't good enough for her, how will that make him feel? If she submits to him out of obligation, how will that make her feel?

What if she approaches him and later is ashamed of wanting her own husband because he isn't good enough for her? It'll be hard for a marriage to last under those conditions. This isn't what you want for Susan. Forgive him. Accept him. You'll be doing your daughter a favor. — Elaine Cantrell

Better to live one year as a tiger, then a hundred as sheep. — Madonna

The student asked the master,
"Teacher, what should I do to become great?"
the master replied:
Succeed where others have failed. — Matshona Dhliwayo

I have done nothing; the Word has done and accomplished everything ... I let the Word do its work! — Martin Luther

When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out. He will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God. Consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for himself. — Oswald Chambers

It's usually painful for a woman, the first time," he murmured.
"Yes, I know."
"I don't want to hurt you."
The admission touched and surprised her. "My mother says it doesn't last for long," she said.
"The pain?"
"No, the rest of it," she said, and for some reason that made him laugh again.
-Simon & Annabelle — Lisa Kleypas

I was coming back from Tel Aviv recently, and we had forty minutes of bumps. I got so scared I grabbed a paper and pen and put them in my pocket, just in case we crashed and I needed to write a letter from wherever we landed. — Daniela Pestova

When I commented that you seemed a poor sort of monster, your sister said, 'He killed my mother,' and twisted your little cock so hard I thought she was like to pull it off. You shrieked, but it was only when your brother Jaime said, 'Leave him be, you're hurting him,' that Cersei let go of you. 'It doesn't matter,' she told us. 'Everyone says he's like to die soon. He shouldn't even have lived this long.' — George R R Martin

'Catch-22's first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured. — Christopher Buckley

Searches of al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, undertaken since American-backed forces took control there, are not known to have turned up a significant cache of nuclear materials. — Barton Gellman

A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for; what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books. — Thomas Carlyle