A Thousand Splendid Suns Mariam Marriage Quotes

For the first time in her life, Alba wanted to be beautiful. She regretted that the splendid women in her family had not bequeathed their attributes to her, that the only one who had, Rosa the Beautiful, had given her only the algae tones in her hair, which seemed more like a hairdresser's mistake then anything else. Miguel understood the source of her anxiety. He led her by the hand to the huge Venetian mirror that adorned one wall of their secret room, shook the dust from the cracked glass, and lit all the candles they had and arranged them around her. She stared at herself in the thousand pieces of the mirror. In the candlelight her skin was the unreal color of wax statues. Miguel began to caress her and she saw her face transformed in the kaleidoscope of the mirror, and she finally believed that she was the most beautiful woman in the universe because she was able to see herself with Miguel's eyes. ~ Isabel Allende

All money is imaginary," answered the Calcatrix simply. "Money is magic everyone agrees to pretend is not magic. Observe! You treat it like magic, wield it like magic, fear it like magic! Why should a body with more small circles of copper or silver or gold than anyone else have an easy life full of treats every day and sleeping in and other people bowing down? The little circles can't get up and fight a battle or make a supper so splendid you get full just by looking at it or build a house of a thousand gables. They can do those things because everyone agrees to give them power. If everyone agreed to stop giving power to pretty metals and started giving it to thumbnails or mushroom caps or roof shingles or first kisses or tears or hours or puffin feathers, those little circles would just lay there tarnishing in the rain and not making anyone bow their noses down to the ground or stick them up in the air. ~ Catherynne M Valente

A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated ... ~ Khaled Hosseini

-Such dark thoughts for the sake of a corner table. My inner Jiminy Cricket spoke up. Oh, all right, I said. May the world's small things fill her with delight.
-Good, good, spoke the cricket.
-and may she purchase a lottery ticket and possess the winning number,
-Unnecessary, but fine.
-And may she order a thousand such bags, each one more splendid than the last, delivered and dumped by FedEx, and may she be trapped by a storeroom's worth, without food, water, or cell phone.
-I'm leaving, said my conscience.
-Me too, I said, and I went back out on the street. ~ Patti Smith

It must be splendid to command millions of people in great national ventures, to lead a hundred thousand to victory in battle. But it seems to me greater still to discover fundamental truths in a very modest room with very modest means - truths that will still be foundations of human knowledge when the memory of these battles is painstakingly preserved only in the archives of the historian. ~ Ludwig Boltzmann

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came, - the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon, - that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure, - he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.

The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

One deed from a sage achieves more than a thousand deeds from warriors. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,
if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,
and they are themselves so much the better morally for it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It made the woman feel like a thousand seas had come together from all worlds, like faraway lands had been bridged together, and the vastness of the known and the unknown were somehow easier to comprehend. ~ Cristina M. Sburlea

A thousand time knocked down by life; A thousand times pick-up by the Lord. ~ Rick W. Terry

And what people want to own, of course, is real estate. So a dental hygienist with bad credit making forty thousand dollars a year felt that she deserved to park her ass in a million-dollar home. With a little creative financing, and as long as housing prices continued to rise, she believed that she could afford a million-dollar home. And as long as the dental hygienist continued to pay interest on the mortgage for the million-dollar home, as long as housing prices continued to rise, as long as more loan officers approved more loans for more dental hygienists with bad credit who could continue to pay the interest on their overblown mortgages, housing prices would indeed stay stratospheric, and banks could print money based on that certainty. And, like your nursery rhyme, that was the house that Jack built." Kalchefsky ~ Jade Chang

An emulation operating at a speed of ten thousand times that of a biological brain would be able to read a book in a few seconds and write a PhD thesis in an afternoon. ~ Nick Bostrom

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Oh the torn up ticket stubs
From a hundred thousand mugs
Now washed away with dead dreams in the rain
And the carparks going up
And they're pulling down the pubs
And its just another bloody rainy day ~ Shane MacGowan

New Rule: Let the Pope be Pope. An animal-rights group in Italy has asked Pope Benedict to give up his fur-trimmed cape and hat. To which the Pope replied, "Don't be hatin' on my cape, bitch." Sorry, but Popes are the original divas, they invented bling, they've been wearing outlandish outfits for a thousand years
almost as long as Elton John. The clothes, the jewels, the fancy palace ... Those aren't just symbols of the Papacy, they are the Papacy. The day the Pope shows up on the balcony in a pair of jeans and polo shirt is the day a billion Catholics go, "What the hell were we thinking? ~ Bill Maher

If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa. ~ Olive Schreiner

Then let amorous kisses dwell On our lips, begin and tell A Thousand and a Hundred score A Hundred, and a Thousand more. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Crow paced back and forth, his form flickering like flame. "It's been a thousand years, Alister. I never intended for anyone to find it, so it's very well protected. One little misstep, and you and my line will be history."
"Since when are you so concerned about your line?" Han said.
Crow stared at him for a long moment. "Since I found out I had one, ~ Cinda Williams Chima

He makes a face and tosses the flower at me. It lands on my cheek, and I pick it up and twirl it between my fingers. I could lie out here all day, not moving an inch, feeling the sun above and the grass below. With a contented sigh, I stretch my arms wide, raking the grass with my fingers - and find myself brushing Aladdin's hand with my own. I pull it away quickly, my cheeks warming. He laughs a little.
"Sometimes," he says, "I forget you're supposed to be four thousand years old. You act as shy as a girl of sixteen."
"I do not!" I sit up and glare at him.
He grins and shrugs, sliding his hands under his head. There are bits of grass stuck in his hair, and after a moment's hesitation, I reach over and flick them away.
Aladdin watches me silently, his throat bobbing as he swallows. I drop my gaze. ~ Jessica Khoury

Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made. ~ Ransom Riggs

But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources -- the unconscious wells of fantasy-- and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom. ~ Joseph Campbell

Don't fight them anymore.I'm going to go with them."
"No. I won't let them take you."
"You have to," I begged.
He was breathing hard, every part of him braced and ready to attack. We locked gazes, and a thousand messages seemed to flow between us as the old electricity crackled in the air. ~ Richelle Mead

I thought in over a thousand years I'd seen all there was to see. ~ Charlaine Harris

His lights blinked in binary read-out as he answered by voder, Eleven thousand two hundred thirty-eight with uncertainty plus-minus eighty-one representing possible identities and nulls. Shall I start program? ~ Robert A. Heinlein

She could recall almost nothing of them. She tried a thousand times, but for the greater part that section of her memory was as smooth and numb as scar tissue. Sometimes, just sometimes, she convinced herself that she could remember stray images or impressions, but she could not describe them properly or make sense of them. ~ Frances Hardinge

I've hit the Pick 6 for a hundred thousand a couple of times. A few more for 60, 70 thousand. ~ Dick Van Patten

Trying to get himself back in line, he kissed the inside of her knee. She touched his hair, reaching down to loosen his ponytail like he'd done with hers. She brushed her fingers over the back of his neck, saying more with that one gesture than she could have with a thousand words.I want you. I trust you. I love you. ~ Cari Quinn

A dollar spent on your needs goes further than a thousand dollars spent on your wants. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Even when you err, it is a thousand times better to err out of conviction than to hide your true opinion to respect some authority. ~ Houston Stewart Chamberlain

I spent all day wandering up and down the hallways, staring at the Mona Lisa and Canova's 'Psyche and Cupid' and the 'Venus de Milo' and Caravaggio's 'The Death of the Virgin' and hundreds of other works in all shapes and sizes and colors. Just before I was about to leave, I was staring at Michelangelo's 'The Dying Slave', and I suddenly realized that every single work I had seen expressed the same thing, the same intense longing for beauty and immortality and justice and compassion. It was as though all of these artists from throughout history were there in those long hallways crying out the same anguished plea in a thousand different languages. ~ Jonathan Hull

From a thousand miles away. There's nothing you could become that I haven't already fallen in love with. He ~ Rainbow Rowell

You know, photo conversations are replacing verbal conversations. I don't know if that's a bad thing. A photo is worth a thousand words. ~ Ashton Kutcher

I love dishes and house things so I kind of lost it a little bit on the house ware. One-thousand thread-count sheets, that's what I indulged in. ~ Toni Braxton

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on ~ Salvador Dali

Being with you was like sweet April air after a thousand winters. I'd forgotten what it was like to live. ~ Heather R. Blair

But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met - the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did - the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I hesitate, then put my other hand on top of his. We're partners. Always have been, even when I hate him, when he's a thousand miles away, when he loves my sister ... even when it'd be easier to go it alone for good. ~ Jackson Pearce

... Broken people just need piecing back together.
For so long I'd carried the pieces of me. Every now and then I'd drop one like a breadcrumb. So I could find my way home. Then Ashley came along and gathered the pieces and somewhere between 11,000 fee and sea level, the picture began taking shape. Dim at first, then clearer. Not yet clear. But these things take time.
Maybe each of us was once a complete whole. A clear picture. A single piece. Then something happened to crack and shatter us. Leaving us disconnected, torn and splintered. Some of us lie in a hundred pieces. Some ten thousand. Some are edged with sharp contrast. Some dim shades of gray. Some find they are missing pieces. Some find they have too many. In any case, we are left shaking our heads. It can't be done.
Then someone comes along who mends a tattered edge, or returns a lost piece. The process is tedious, painful, and there are no shortcuts. Anything that promises to be one is not.
But somehow, as we walk from the crash site - away from he wreckage - whole sections start taking shape, something vague we see out of the corner of our eye. For a second, we stop shaking our heads. We wonder. Maybe...just maybe.
It's risky for both of us. You must hope in an image you can't see, and I must trust you with me.
That's the piecing. ~ Charles Martin

One night Death left his card. I was not familiar with the name he chose: but the black edge was deep. I flung it back. A thousand awakenings of violence. ~ Wyndham Lewis

problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines developed by Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and a virologist named Hilary Koprowski (about whose controversial career, more later) came into wide use, eventually eliminating poliomyelitis throughout most of the world. In 1988, WHO and several partner institutions ~ David Quammen

I really believe that you grow up a certain way in New York. There's a New York morality, a sense of loyalty. You know how to win and lose. There's a thousand kids outside, you know who to push and who not to push. There's a sixth sense you develop just because it's New York. ~ James Caan

Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.
Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions. ~ Lorraine Anderson

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg.
Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter ... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold ... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle. ~ Alan Moore

Gonpo Tso was born a princess. As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father. ~ Barbara Demick