Malavika Mukundan > Malavika's Quotes

“Sanity is not statistical.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
― Agatha Christie, Peril at End House

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

“German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“General benevolence, but not general friendship, make a man what he ought to be.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past.”
― Baroness Emma Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you do not understand me.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“She looks very virtuous and very melancholy."

"Virtue is like the precious odors, most fragrant when it is crushed.”
― Baroness Emma Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“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

“She'd also called me brave...unless she was talking to the catfish.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

“If you are to be Hercule Poirot, you must think of everything.”
― Agatha Christie

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.”
― George Carlin

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!”
― Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?
MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.”
― Georges Perec, L'infra-ordinaire

“What a marvellous invention man is! He can blow on his hands to warm them up, and blow on his soup to cool it down.”
― Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep