Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Dracula by Bram Stoker

  • A stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not--and to know not is to care not for.
  • A woman ought to tell her husband everything.
  • I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.
  • How many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives?
  • Life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin'; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.
  • Though sympathy can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.
  • All men are mad in some way or the other; and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen, too--the rest of the world. You tell not your madmen what you do nor why you do it; you tell them not what you think. So you shall keep knowledge in its place, where it may rest--where it may gather its kind around it and breed.
  • When the corn is grown, even before it has ripened--while the milk of its mother-earth is in him, and the sunshine has not yet begun to paint him with his gold, the husbandman he pull the ear and rub him between his rough hands, and blow away the green chaff, and say to you: 'Look! he's good corn; he will make good crop when the time comes.'
  • The good husbandman tell you so then because he knows but not till then. But you do not find the good husbandman dig up his planted corn to see if he grow; that is for the children who play at husbandry, and not for those who take it as of the work of their life.
  • Knowledge is stronger than memory and we should not trust the weaker.
  • Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!
  • How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
  • My belief in him helps him to have a belief in himself.
  • Let us not be two, but one, that so we work to a good end.
  • Devotion is so rare, and we are so grateful to those who show it unasked to those we love.
  • We and you too will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet. But we must be brave of heart and unselfish, and do our duty, and all will be well!
  • We men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great; and we break.
  • I suppose a cry does us all good at times--clears the air as other rain does.
  • Trust cannot be where there is mean nature.
  • I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it be. I have tried to keep an open mind; and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.
  • Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?
  • Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young--like the fine ladies at the opera.
  • There are always mysteries in life.
  • I heard once of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.
  • The world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.
  • The milk that is spilt cries not out afterwards.
  • Everything that one does seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring on the very thing which is most to be deplored.
  • It is wonderful what tricks our dreams play us, and how conveniently we can imagine.
  • It is in trouble and trial that our faith is tested.
  • For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the burden that is hard upon us.
  • God will act in His own way and time. Do not fear, and do not rejoice as yet; for what we wish for at the moment may be our undoings.
  • It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way--even by death--and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.'
  • And to superstition must we trust at the first; it was man's faith in the early, and it have its root in faith still.
10/26/2011

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich

  • This is part of the problem with the world today. People don't believe in the mystical.
  • A book of spells is nothing more than a cookbook. Over the years, recipes have evolved for sponge cake, lobster bisque, spontaneous combustion, cheese souffle, levitation, enchantment. It's really not rocket science.
  • I read a book about getting published, and it said persistence would pay off.
  • Possessed implies that demons or other dis-incarnate entities have temporarily taken control of a body.
  • Your life isn't out of control. It's expanded.
  • Could be covers a lot of ground.
  • Everyone makes their own luck.
10/7/2011