Open Veins

It's the same with clothes as it is with thoroughbred hosses and women—you can always tell them, no matter how they've come down in the world. And it's like that with boots too.This chap's boots hadn't been cleaned for days, but they were boots, and not holes to put your feet into, like most people wear.

Arthur J. Rees The Hand in the Dark 1920

... for my part, I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

E. W. Hornung The Amateur Cracksman 1898

He forgot the words of the illustrious duke, who said, "I pay my lackeys to be insolent, to save myself the trouble and ridicule of being so."

Emile Gaboriau The Larouge Case 1866

.. but with a power of silence that was more comforting than speech.

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch Visitors at the Gunnel Rock 1895

One o' these days, you'll find yourself in a better land like the snuff of a candle.

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch The Looe Die-Hards 1895

Do I sleep? do I dream? / Do I wonder and doubt? / Are things what they seem? / Or is visions about? / Is our civilization a failure? / Or is the Caucasian played out?

Francis Bret Harte Nye's Ford, Stanislaus 1870

He had heard that the world revolves, and decided to stand still and let it come round to him.

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch Flowing Source 1895

"You might think of me." "I thought you were doing that."

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch Wandering Heath 1895

Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English, a deadly poison.  A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary 1911

...for every one in the town was ready to look after her as being an idiot, and so specially dear to God.

Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov 1880

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Albert Camus 1913-1960

For men stand, as it were, at different heights, each seeing from his own level, so what the beggar thinks is heaven, the millionaire regards as nothing and what the millionaire pursues, the saint or the thinker regards as a bauble.

M.P. Shiel The Evil That Men Do 1904

I do not look at my face more often than necessary as a general rule, it shakes me too badly to see it.

Sapper (H.C. McNeile) The Female of the Species 1928

It seems to me...that the cause of discomfort and strife is never that we are too near others, but that we are not near enough.

George MacDonald Donal Grant 1883

Only in his simple heart he would like to know in so many words what the commands were; and that is sometimes a little hard, for women like to be half understood before they speak, and the grosser intellect of man seldom more than half understands them after they have spoken.

F. Marion Crawford Doctor Claudius 1883

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Willa Cather The Song of the Lark 1915

[In your 20's] You're like, "I'm so embarrassed I don't have a new shirt for tonight."  By the time you're 44, it's like, "If this is marginally clean, I'm good."

Melissa McCarthy People Magazine July 7, 2014

...art simply represents man's passionate desire to drag the truth out of life in half a dozen different ways.  God does it for you in the country!

E. Phillips Oppenheim The Hillman 1917

The seal of sin is settling on [his] brow.  He looks healthier and less uninteresting.

Thorne Smith The Jovial Ghosts:  The Misadventures of Topper 1926

Life was not given us to waste on gratuitous martyrdoms.

Grant Allen Hilda Wade 1899

"I don't often do much thinking," said Rosamund. "It seems a waste of time."

Agatha Christie After the Funeral 1953

Happiness,...not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour.

Walt Whitman Chants Democratic 1871

To have what we want is riches, but to be able to do without is power.

George MacDonald Donal Grant 1883

Marriage destroys the icing, but reveals the cake, and you can't live on almond icing any more than you can make a square meal of Turkish Delight.

Edgar Wallace Circumstantial Evidence and Other Stories 1934

But...still it is only a child; and I can't centre all my hopes in a child: that is only one degree better than devoting oneself to a dog.

Anne Brontë Agnes Grey 1847

Hate is very lowering, isn't it...?

Josephine Tey A Shilling for Candles 1936

There is nothing quite as effective as a noticeable rotundity for reducing the conscious ego.

Edgar Wallace The Cat Burglar and Other Stories 1929

...the terrible strength of the weak, the gentle, the tender hearted.

Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind 1936

You're that green that the very cows would eat you.

Anthony Trollope The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson 1862

...drudge don't sound so well.  Call her a ministering angel instead, and it comes to the same thing.

Anthony Trollope The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson 1862

The religion of kindness has no temples and no priests, but all the same it's not a bad faith to adhere to.

Arthur Gask The Night of the Storm 1937

Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.

Wilkie Collins The Law and the Lady 1875

Those who persecute, to overturn religion, can scarcely pretend to more philosophy, or more liberality, than those who persecute to support it.

Maria Edgeworth Belinda 1800

It was seven o'clock, the sun was setting, the sky was warming to its last loveliness of rose and amber, and amethyst, colours with names almost as beautiful as themselves.

Edith Œnone Somerville & Martin Ross Mount Music 1919

Each time that she approached...they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.

Thomas Hardy On the Western Circuit 1891

I try twice as hard and I'm half as liked....And that's alright.

Fun.: Bhasker, Ruess, Dost, Dough Some Nights 2012

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Albert Camus 1913-1960

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;But thinks admitted to that equal sky,His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Alexander Pope Essay on Man 1734

Very.  I sometimes buy a cheap copy and substitute the names of my pet enemies all through the Inferno wherever they will suit the foot.  In that way I get all the satisfaction the author got by putting his friends in hell, without the labor of writing, or the ability to compose, the poem.

F. Marion Crawford Doctor Claudius 1883

Women are very like religion - we must take them on faith, or go without.

F. Marion Crawford Doctor Claudius 1883

Whatever heaven may be, there is no earthly paradise without woman, nor is there anywhere a place so desolate, so dreary, so unutterably miserable that a woman cannot make it seem heaven to the man she loves, and who loves her.

F. Marion Crawford By the Waters of Paradise 1894

If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that some one at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.

F. Marion Crawford The Screaming Skull 1911

Yet nature has her freaks in the making of a man's mind; she indulges herself and makes a few honest folk now and again....

Honoré de Balzac Melmoth Reconciled 1835

She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks.  She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded, by any rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public Instruction.

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant The Necklace 1884

I noticed...that when they had swallowed a certain amount of information they held up their heads much like fowls after drinking.

S. Baring-Gould, M.A. The Merewigs (contained in A Book of Ghosts) 1904

His researches into the world of men had been too devastating for a mind which, though superior in quality, was immature and delicate. But the wild had cleansed him, healed him, brought him to sanity again. He could now put /Homo sapiens/ at arm's length for study and appreciation. And he saw that, though no divinity, the creature was after all a noble and even a lovable beast, indeed the noblest and most lovable of them all; nay further, that its very repulsiveness lay in its being something more than beast, but not enough more. A normal human being, he now ungrudgingly admitted, was indeed a spirit of a higher order than any beast, though in the main obtuse, heartless, unfaithful to the best in himself.

Olaf Stapledon Odd John 1935

But existence is an awful grandeur and delight.

George MacDonald Adela Cathcart 1864

I am an old bachelor; not very far from fifty, in fact; old enough, at all events, to be able to take pleasure in watching without sharing; yet ready, notwithstanding, when occasion offers, to take any necessary pat in what may be going on, I am able, as it were, to sit quietly alone, and look down upon life from a second-floor window, delighting myself with my own speculations...yet...I am not the last to rush down stairs and into the street, upon occasion....

George MacDonald Adela Cathcart 1864

How weary she would find it to walk alone down the long paths of old age! how hard it was to be deprived of a dear arm on whose support she had reckoned for when "the slow dark hours begin"!

John Meade Falkner The Nebuly Coat 1903

I tell you, sirrah, I have been in love, and I have been jilted - jilted, sir! and when I was jilted, I thought the jilting itself quite enough, without improving the matter by getting myself buried, dead or alive.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu The Cock and Anchor 1895

...we should never, I say, revile Fortune, for just at that moment when she appears to have deserted us, she may be only gone away to seek some richest treasure to bring back with her.

J. Meade Falkner Moonfleet 1898

He always had time—time to talk and to read, time to wonder quietly, time to listen to those who valued his listening, time to rephrase his pedantries for those who found them arduous in the original.

Theodore Sturgeon More Than Human 1953

The two words, 'Hope on,' are ever beating to and fro in my brain, like the tickings of that clock, and sometimes I persuade myself that the time-piece says, 'Hope on, hope on.'

Ellen Wood It May Be True 1865

She will become famous.  What shame and misery!

Emile Gaboriau L'Affaire Lerouge 1866

That [he] was one of those...which are apt to exercise an uncanny influence over the weak and the foolish folk with whom they come in contact, - the kind of creature for whom it is always just as well to keep a seasoned rope close handy.

Richard Marsh The Beetle: A Mystery 1897

The horse is a closely sympathetic beast, and will make his turns, and do his trottings, and comport himself generally in strict unison with the pulsations of his master's heart.  When a horse won't jump it is generally the case that the inner man is declining to jump also, let the outer man seem ever so anxious to accomplish the feat.

Anthony Trollope The Belton Estate 1866

but gardeners, as a class, are a profane people.

Anthony Trollope The Belton Estate 1866

"I don't know," he said, "that I have any particular objection in detail to your excellent scheme of Government.  My only objection is a quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an alternative, to be a toad in a ditch."

G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill 1904

How tenfold sorrowful are our sorrows when borne in solitude!

Anthony Trollope The Bertrams 1859

one thing I am clear and sure about is this that Jesus Christ was not equal to His father.

Elizabeth Gaskell from a letter to her daughter Marianne (1810-1865)

...but after all, it is only prettiness that requires a dimple:  full-blown beauty wants no such adventitious aid.

Anthony Trollope The Bertrams 1859

The darker forms of superstition, like lower organisms, are more tenacious of life....

James Bowker, F.R.G.S.I. Goblin Tales of Lancashire 1883

There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives.

Charles Dickens Bleak House 1852

If there be courage and mental activity, and no conscience, we have a very dangerous devil.

J. Sheridan LeFanu Willing to Die 1872

For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but Good, never.

Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend 1864

I was then five-and-twenty, - that was a sufficient indication that I had a past....

Ivan Turgenev Annouchka, A Tale 1884

I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.

Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drood 1870

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

It has been said there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice upon a dark night.

Ernest Bramah Kai Lung's Golden Hours 1922

The LORD said to the prophet Elijah, "Have you noticed how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Since he has done this, I will not bring disaster on him during his lifetime; it will be during his son's lifetime that I will bring disaster on Ahab's family."

Jeremiah (?) I Kings 21:29 6th c. BC

Barrant reflected that women resembled horses in value.  The mettlesome showy ones were bred to display their paces for rich men only.  Serviceable hacks, warranted to work a lifetime, could not be expected to be ornamental as well as useful.  So long as they pulled their burdens without jibbing overmuch, one had to be content.

Arthur J. Rees The Moon Rock 1922

At nine years old, Christian was a little rag of a girl; a rag, but imbued with the spirit of the rag that is nailed to the mast, and flaunts, unconquered, until it is shot away.

Edith Œnone Somerville & Martin Ross Mount Music 1919

God gives us the tools and the courage, but we have to do the work ourselves.

Tom Crean Indiana University Basketball Coach 2012

St. Patrick was a gentleman

Anonymous Irish Toasts, edited by Karen Bailey 1996

We're all just songs in the end.  If we are lucky.

George R. R. Martin A Storm of Swords 2000

It was arranged on the plan of many college libraries, with tall, projecting bookcases forming deep recesses of dusty silence, fit graves for the old hates of forgotten controversy, the dead passions of forgotten lives.

W.F. Harvey The Beast with Five Fingers 1919

If I harmed you in any way,...I regret not doing a whole lot more of it.

James Lee Burke The Glass Rainbow 2010

As long as we have a spark of commonsense left, we are not really in love.

Émile Gaboriau The Clique of Gold 1871

An enterprising advertiser asks, "What is more terrible than war?" We answer unhesitatingly, oranges in the hands of young children.

Edith Œnone Somerville & Martin Ross Through Connemara in a Governess-Cart 1893

He submitted to the force of events as a cabbage-leaf submits to the teeth of a rabbit.

Wilkie Collins Heart and Science 1883

Beloved, never avenge yourselves...if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.

Paul of Tarsus The Epistle to the Romans 12:19-20 50's

From this moment I hate and despise him.  Tell him I am willing to be his wife.

Émile Gaboriau Within an Inch of His Life 1873

[He] was a gentleman and an officer, and of course an honourable man; but somehow I should not have liked to buy a horse from him.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu Wylder's Hand 1864

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

Terry Pratchett Hogfather 1996

Miss Cynthia was a nigger once, and oh, the trouble she had.

Agatha Christie The Mysterious Affair at Styles 1920

I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason.

Wilkie Collins The Moonstone 1868

Manure your garden: and marry if you dare.

Charles Kightly The Perpetual Almanack of Folklore 1987

The first room, with a large, dilapidated stove and two dirty windows, has a black measure for measuring the prisoners in one corner, and in another corner hung a large image of Christ, as is usual in places where they torture people.

Leo Tolstoy Resurrection 1899

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Walter Smith The Bloody Typewriter 1954