Gordon Dahlquist Quotes

Beauty is more a danger than intelligence or wit. One becomes a living mirror for the inadequacies of others.

She did not especially appreciate children either, but could be kind to them when they were silent.

There was too much to say - she wanted to prove her independence but knew the Contessa would not care, she wanted revenge but knew the Contessa would never admit her defeat.

This was how people were able to do things when they didn't want to - they made themselves feel something else, like anger, more than the fear.

She was already fierce. She required none of this nonsense, and if she'd carried a man's strength and her father's horsewhip these villains would as one be on their knees.

That she now had a kind of uniform and a set of tools made everything that much easier and much less about her particular feelings, for tasks requiring clothes and accoutrements were by definition objective, even scientific, in nature.

I didn't understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur.

It's impossible to read The Poison Belt, written in 1913, and not see in its exterminating vision a shadow of the coming war that would, only slightly less effectively, destroy Conan Doyle's world.

Heroines did not pick their own battles - the ones they knew they could win. On the contrary, they managed what they had to manage, and they did not lie to themselves about relying on others for help instead of accomplishing the thing alone.

She was difficult, she knew. She did not make friends. She was brisk and demanding, unsparing and indulgent.

Chang despised authority on principle, for even when veiled by the rubric of practical necessity or the weight of tradition he could not see institutional power as anything but an expression of arbitrary personal will, and it galled him profoundly.

First you say I am a murderer - an agent in league against you - and now I am a deluded heartsick girl! Pray make up your mind so I can scoff at you with precision!

Wake him or put a bullet through his brain. No one will protest. Or leave him - but I suggest choosing, my dear. I have learned it is best to be haunted by one's actions rather than one's lack of them.

each man braces his fear against his love. What you love may change. But if you love still, your fear remains

What use is decency when we have been thrust into this peril - treading about without even a corset! Are we to be judged?