Bryson Hedrick > Bryson's Quotes

“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence. ”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”
― H.G. Wells

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Terrorism" is a word with little content - it is a label for brutalities committed by "the enemy", and from which one's own acts of destruction are exempted. It is an inchoate and emotionally laden concept, a semantic mirror of our dishonesty and a repository for everything about war that we would like to disavow. Making a sharp distinction between war and terrorism is at best a self-deceptive game.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“The impressive record of atrocities racked up by the human race does not suggest that our conduct is guided by sympathy for others.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in the dark?”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves. It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things, but I set them down that my story may lack nothing. Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity.”
― H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Falcon Classics) [The 50 Best Classic Books Ever - # 46]

“Time is only a kind of Space.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“But, as I say, I was too
full of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have never
known danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“And it was pointless...to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell...for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“One must keep a store of common sense,” said Tchitchikov, “and consult one’s common sense at every minute, have a friendly conversation with it.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls - Full Version (Annotated)

“Love, like fire, goes out without fuel.”
― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time