[last lines] Turkish: [narrating] Tommy persuaded me to keep the dog. I eventually agreed, as long as he took it to a vet. I couldn't stand that squeaking any more. The vet found half an undigested shoe, a squeaky toy, and an 84-carat diamond lodged ...
Red: [narrating] The following April Andy did tax returns for half the guards at Shawshank. Year after that he did them all including the warden's. Year after that they rescheduled the start of the intra-mural season to coincide with tax season. The ...
Elinor Dashwood: Poor Willoughby. He will always regret you. Marianne: But does it follow that, had he chosen me, he would have been content? He would have had a wife he loved, but no money, and might soon have learned to rank the demands of his pock...
Anthony Hope: You wait for him here. I'll return with a coach in less than half an hour. Don't worry no one'll recognize you. You're safe now. Johanna: Safe? So we run away and then all our dreams come true? Anthony Hope: I hope so. Johanna: I've nev...
Kevin: It's like this: you wake and watch TV, get in your car and listen to the radio you go to your little jobs or little school, but you don't hear about that on the 6 o'clock news, why? 'Cause nothing is really happening, and you go home and watch...
Fran Kubelik: I never catch colds. C.C. Baxter: Really? I was reading some figures from the Sickness and Accident Claims Division. You know that the average New Yorker between the ages of twenty and fifty has two and a half colds a year? Fran Kubelik...
Few societies have come to grips with the new demography. We cling to the notion of retirement at sixty-five - a reasonable notion when those over sixty-five were a tiny percentage of the population but increasingly untenable as they approach 20 perc...
The U.S. Census Bureau considers mothers the "designated parent," even when both parents are present in the home. When mothers care for their children, it's "parenting," but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a "child care ...
Measured in terms of the World Bank poverty standard, the number of poor people in China fell from 652 million to 135 million between 1981 and 2004 - in other words, more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty. The number of poor peopl...
Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and grovelling submission to those you can't. Once having set up her idols and built altars to the, it was imevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she would accept any inconsistency and...
So our virtues Lie in the interpretation of the time: And power, unto itself most commendable, Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair To extol what it hath done. One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail; Rights by rights falter, strengths by s...
This pause in time, within time ... When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is only possible with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on one's own, one's certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothi...
One cannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the story is worthwhile because until one has finished writing the story one does not know for sure what the idea is; and one cannot judge the style of a story on the basis of a first draft, beca...
But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.
When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unp...
Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of t...
Love means to realise that we are one with life. Real love means to realise that we are one with the other person, one with nature, and one with the trees, the stones, the earth and the blue sky. It means to realise that all of life is God.
Love is two unicorns arguing over which is better: one animal with two horns, like a bull, or two animals with one horn apiece. I guess it doesn’t matter, because you should never debate when you’re horny.
She turns her head, Bailey catches her eye, and she smiles at him. Not in the way that one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittens but in the way that one smiles ...
One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!" And a little later you added: "You know-- one loves the sunet, when one is so sad..." "Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?" But the little prince made ...
It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best." -Destruction