Terrible Quotes - Page 10

• They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.

  Terry Pratchett

  Dying, Done, World

  "Sourcery". Book by Terry Pratchett, 1988.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes people say terrible things when they're scared. They don't mean to, but they can't help it. They lash out because if they can see that their words hurt someone else, it makes them feel as if they aren't completely powerless.

  Jonathan Maberry

  Hurt, Mean, People

  Jonathan Maberry (2012). “Tales of the Rot & Ruin: Rot & Ruin; Dust & Decay; Dead & Gone, a Rot & Ruin story; Flesh & Bone”, p.684, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

  John Green

  Memories, Eye, Visible

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.113, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

  John Green

  Rocks, Sea, Water

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.170, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Rooms, Share, Conversation

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.278, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory," and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.

  John Green

  Mistake, Suffering, Wish

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.139, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

  Jeanette Winterson

  Class, Community, Want

  Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.17, Random House

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Then there were things-- epic, terrible things-- that he didn't tell her but skirted around, like caressing the edges of a wound, hesitant, testing for pain.

  Laini Taylor

  Pain, Epic, Testing

  4 Copy quote

• I want to cry because something terrible happened, and I saw it, and I could not see a way to mend it.

  Veronica Roth

  Want, Way, Saws

  4 Copy quote

• Someday an opportunity will come. Think about Harry Potter. His life is terrible, but then a letter arrives, he gets on a train, and everything is different for him afterward. Better. Magical." "That's just a story." "So are we- we're stories too.

  Matthew Quick

  Opportunity, Thinking, Different

  Matthew Quick (2012). “Boy21”, p.157, Hachette UK

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Yankees, Manners, Accents

  Margaret Mitchell (2016). “Gone with the Wind”, p.214, Hamilton Books

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say

  Richard Yates

  Believe, Thinking, Self

  7 Copy quote

• I'll never be ready. Yet at the same time, you always want to reach the end. You can't fly to a destination and linger in the air. I want to reach the end of this thing, and I feel terrible about it.

  Kaui Hart Hemmings

  Air, Want, Ends

  4 Copy quote

• A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Blood, Color, Law

  4 Copy quote

• Another funny thing about having friends was that they expected things of you. they made you want to not be a terrible, awful, execrable person. They made you feel worse when you were one. It was a lot easier not to have any friends.

  Francine Pascal

  Funny Things, Want, Awful

  Francine Pascal (2012). “Fearless: Fearless; Sam; Run”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The funny thing about good people—people like Daneca—is that they really honestly don’t get the impulse toward evil. They have an incredibly hard time reconciling with the idea that a person who makes them smile can still be capable of terrible things. Which is why, although she’s accusing me of being a murderer, she seems more annoyed than actually worried about getting murdered. Daneca seems to persist in a belief that if I would just listen and understand how bad my bad choices are, I’d stop making them.

  Holly Black

  Hard Times, Funny Things, Ideas

  Holly Black (2012). “Black Heart”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Her mind was all disorder. The past, present, future, every thing was terrible.

  Jane Austen

  Past, Mind, Disorder

  Jane Austen (2014). “Jane Austen Collection: illustrated - 6 eBooks and 140+ illustrations”, p.777, Ageless Reads

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but . . . what we are meant to be.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Reality, Fire, Burned

  Madeleine L'Engle (2017). “The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention”, p.10, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.

  Dorianne Laux

  Girl, Sweet, Rain

  Dorianne Laux (2000). “Smoke: poems”, BOA Editions Ltd.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• But then why is it so terrible for me to be with the girl I love? Everyone one is permitted to have what they want, express their love as they please, without fear of harassment, ostracism, persecution, or even the law. Even emotionally abusive, adulterous relationships are often tolerated, despite the harm they cause others. In our progressive, permissive society, all these harmful, unhealthy types of "love" are allowed--but not ours.

  Tabitha Suzuma

  Girl, Law, Want

  Tabitha Suzuma (2012). “Forbidden”, p.372, Simon and Schuster

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am the Wizard of Oz of housewives (in that I am both "Great and Terrible" and because I sometimes hide behind the curtains

  Jenny Lawson

  Wizards, Sometimes, Curtains

  Jenny Lawson (2012). “Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir)”, p.147, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.

  Jean Cocteau

  Dream, Animal, Reality

  7 Copy quote

• I do trust you, is what I want to say. But it isn't true -- I didn't trust him to love me despite the terrible things I had done. I don't trust anyone to do that, but that isn't his problem; it's mine.

  Veronica Roth

  Done, Want, Problem

  6 Copy quote

• We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

  Laura Hillenbrand

  War, Islands, Said

  Laura Hillenbrand (2010). “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”, p.83, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.

  Geoff Dyer

  Unbearable, Life Is, Unbearable Things

  Geoff Dyer (2012). “Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence”, p.127, Canongate Books

  12 Copy quote

  Show source