Mysterious Quotes - Page 19

• What are so mysterious as the eyes of a child?

  Phyllis Bottome

  Children, Eye, Eyes Of A Child

  Phyllis Bottome (1917). “The Derelict: And Also The Liquer Glass, Mademoiselle L'Anglaise, The Awkward Turn, The Syren's Isle, Ironstone, The Pace, Brother Leo”

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• Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Kings, Forever, Honor

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• I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light.

  Janette Turner Hospital

  Writing, Dark, Light

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• I speak as your native guide to the mysterious tribe called the English. Dress code is everything. You can be a card-carrying Nazi, you can pay gigolos to eat gnocchi out of your navel and you won't be pilloried -- as long as you never, ever wear linen with tweed.

  Kathy Lette

  Long, Dresses, Dress Code

  Kathy Lette (2012). “Foetal Attraction”, p.48, Random House

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• O mysterious Night! thou art not silent; many tongues halt thou.

  Joanna Baillie

  Art, Night, Tongue

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• We lisp in numbers, in the U.S. We are deluged by ample, often mysterious statistics. ... Like many in this country, I have come to regard statistics with doubt and merely as a hint of the probable shape of fact.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Country, Data, Numbers

  Martha Gellhorn (1988). “The View from the Ground”, p.280, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• Faith is the new, the mysterious, the surprising. Nobody has ever been there before.

  Carter Heyward

  Faith, Surprising

  Carter Heyward (1976). “A Priest Forever”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

  Paul Theroux

  Century, Scholarship, Enjoyed

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• A mysterious fraternity born out of smoke and danger of death.

  Stephen Crane

  Fraternity, Danger, Born

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• The description you have been given of the world is an aberrant one. It does not accept and give proper place to the nagual, to the mysterious unknown that is our heritage.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Giving, Doe

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• We who are crushed to earth with heavy chains, who travel a weary, rugged, thorny road, groping through midnight darkness on earth, earn our right to enjoy the sunshine in the great hereafter. At the grave, at least, we should be permitted to lay our burdens down, that a new world, a world of brightness, may open to us. The light that is denied us here should grow into a flood of effulgence beyond the dark, mysterious shadows of death.

  Elizabeth Keckley

  Dark, Sunshine, Shadow Of Death

  Elizabeth Keckley (1868). “Behind the scenes; or, Thirty years a slave, and four years in the White house”, p.24

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• I think Hemingway's [book] titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway's success. His titles have a life of their own, and they have enriched the American vocabulary.

  Sylvia Beach

  Book, Thinking, Vocabulary

  Sylvia Beach (1991). “Shakespeare and Company”, p.83, U of Nebraska Press

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• Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things.

  John Dewey

  Depth, Purpose, Moral

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.231, Courier Corporation

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• Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Historical, Born

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• In terms of homosexuality, not everyone is prepared for a daily struggle against nature. In some ways, people who challenge and subvert their biologically-determined body are struggling against nature. It's a mysterious combination of nature and nurture that determines a person's gender, and for whatever reason some people are driven to challenge their biological "destiny". It's a difficult struggle, and I believe it takes a lot of courage.

  Bruce LaBruce

  Believe, Struggle, Destiny

  Interview with Jane Harris, logger.believermag.com. May 29, 2014.

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• Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.

  Isabel Allende

  Writing, Air, Creative

  Interview with Marisel Mendoza, www.ventanalatina.co.uk. April 10, 2013.

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• My parents had come from Mexico, a short road in my imagination. I felt myself as coming from a caramelized planet, an upside-down planet, pineapple-cratered. Though I was born here, I came from the other side of the looking glass, as did Alice, though not alone like Alice. Downtown I saw lots of brown people. Old men on benches. Winks from Filipinos. Sikhs who worked in the fields were the most mysterious brown men, their heads wrapped in turbans. They were the rose men. They looked like roses.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Men, Glasses, Rose

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.13, Penguin

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• The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.

  Gertrude Atherton

  Art, Sex, Real

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• There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.

  Anne Truitt

  Art, Quality, Talent

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• The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic and aloof, guarded, gentle and mysterious.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Ocean, Hawaii, Fluid

  Francine Du Plessix Gray (1972). “Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress”

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• Our minds are the most mysterious things about us.

  Elsa Barker

  Mysterious Things, Mind

  Elsa Barker (1928). “The Cobra Candlestick”

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• The best thing about the world is that it has a mysterious structure and the worst thing is that it has a grievous structure.

  Kedar Joshi

  World, Structure, Worst

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• Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to its shimmering red presence in the clear night sky. It is like a glowing ember in a field of ethereal lights, projecting energy and promise. It inspires visions of an approachable world. The mind vaults to thoughts of what might have been (if Mars were a litter closer to the warming Sun) and of what could be (if humans were one day to plant colonies there).

  John Noble Wilford

  Eye, Night, Light

  John Noble Wilford (1991). “Mars Beckons: The Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space”, Vintage

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• I'm such an avid magazine reader - music, art, beauty magazines - and I found that food and restaurants were pouring into everything I cared about. Whether it was the pop-up concept, or some mysterious mini-mall restaurant, I got swept up in the sexy romance of the food movement.

  Drew Barrymore

  Sexy, Art, Avid

  "Drew Barrymore on Making Wine, Cooking for Her Family, and Getting 'Swept Up' in the Food Movement". Interview with Alyssa Shelasky, www.bonappetit.com. July 16, 2013.

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• To-morrow! the mysterious, unknown guest,
  Who cries to me: "Remember Barmecide,
  And tremble to be happy with the rest."
  And I make answer: "I am satisfied;
  I dare not ask; I know not what is best;
  God hath already said what shall betide.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Answers, Guests, Tomorrow

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1871). “The Poetical Works”, p.338

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