Creatures Quotes - Page 12

• Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.

  John Green

  Hands, Ducks, Together

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.105, Penguin

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• Why don't they cut their own children's ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don't they cut off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God's creatures?

  Anna Sewell

  Children, Cutting, Would Be

  Anna Sewell (2014). “BLACK BEAUTY: Fiction, Novel, Children's literature”, p.27, editionNEXT.com

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• A frightening menagerie, my emotions are Too many and varied to number Like creatures they crawl and they fly above Tearing my body asunder.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Numbers, Body, Emotion

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• ...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

  Doris Lessing

  Intelligent, Men, Emotional

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

  Marcel Proust

  Clever, Being In Love, Men

  Marcel Proust “Swann’s Way”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.

  Jane Goodall

  Kindness, Animal, Intelligent

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• Here in this moment we are beautiful, nocturnal creatures and our thoughts and words are jewels guarded by the moon.

  Henry Rollins

  Beautiful, Moon, Jewels

  Henry Rollins (2009). “The Portable Henry Rollins”, p.311, Villard

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• Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.

  Jayne Ann Krentz

  Book, Winning, Romance

  Jayne Ann Krentz (1992). “Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance”, p.5, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• Ah, babies! They’re more than just adorable little creatures on whom you can blame your farts.

  Tina Fey

  Baby, Humor, Adorable

  Tina Fey (2011). “Bossypants”, p.130, Hachette UK

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• When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.

  Algernon Blackwood

  Imagination, Darkness, Suggestions

  Algernon Blackwood (2008). “Three Supernatural Classics: The Willows, the Wendigo and the Listener”, p.31, Courier Corporation

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• Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Clever, Selfish, Kissing

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “Deathless”, p.72, Macmillan

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• ...and we sat like that, one creature in two bodies, for a long time, until I forgot what I'd been upset about and I was myself again.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Two, Long, Upset

  Maggie Stiefvater (2014). “Shiver Series (Shiver, Linger, Forever, Sinner)”, p.165, Scholastic Inc.

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• I'd never taken to four foot creatures who had the uncanny ability to point out all my flaws in thirty second flat. And just for the record, I can too read without moving my lips.

  Darynda Jones

  Moving, Taken, Feet

  Darynda Jones (2011). “First Grave on the Right”, p.39, Macmillan

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• Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Special You, Earth, Want

  Sue Monk Kidd (2003). “The Secret Life of Bees”, p.286, Penguin

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• I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.

  George MacDonald

  Thinking, Born, Made

  George MacDonald (2015). “The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more”, p.1848, e-artnow

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• ...it honestly didn't matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God's creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of the His planet?

  Jane Goodall

  Hurt, Fighting, Special

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• Yes, yes, mistress, I shall go and accomplish your task. Only—I was not only sent to kill the Leucrotta. There is a maiden in a tower—" At this the Witch spat, again rolling her marvelous eyes. "Those revolting creatures are always getting themselves locked up. If only they would stay that way.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Eye, Mistress, Rolling

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• Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.

  Howard Zinn

  Attitude, Mean, Past

  Howard Zinn (2011). “The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy”, p.157, Seven Stories Press

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• She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.

  Guy de Maupassant

  Girl, Sweet, Artist

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• Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of Purpose; everyone's got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn't mean it's and unfriendly place -- just busy and preoccupied. Personally, I love it. I'm a social creature but there are times and places you just don't want to do more than grunt at your fellow human being.

  Laura Anne Gilman

  Morning, Mean, Mind

  Laura Anne Gilman (2011). “Pack of Lies”, p.65, LUNA

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• Heaven is for thee too high To know what passes there; be lowly wise. Think only what concerns thee and thy being; Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there Live, in what state, condition, or degree, Contented that thus far hath been revealed.

  John Milton

  Wise, Dream, Thinking

  'Paradise Lost' (1667) bk. 8, l. 172

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• Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. [...] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Hero, Heart, Angel

  "The Brothers Karamazov". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1879 - 1880.

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• The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

  Marcel Proust

  Memories, Lying, Men

  Marcel Proust (2010). “In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 5: The Captive & The Fugitive”, p.515, Random House

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• We may indeed in counsel point to the higher road, but we cannot compel any free creature to walk upon it. That leadeth to tyranny, which disfigureth good and maketh it seem hateful.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  May, Hateful, Tyranny

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• This one isn’t just any old horse. There’s a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be? I tell you, my friend, there’s divinity in a horse, and specially in a horse like this. God got it right the day he created them. And to find a horse like this in the middle of this filthy abomination of a war, is for me like finding a butterfly on a dung heap. We don’t belong in the same universe as a creature like this.

  Michael Morpurgo

  Horse, War, Butterfly

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