Block Quotes

'Attack The Block' is an alien invasion film set in South London. It's about a group of kids who are some petty thugs, who have to find the hero in themselves, when they attack. ~ John Boyega

As the brother put the carving knife aside, he said, "Stuffing?"

"Am I breathing?"

Phury shoved a spoon into the bird and piled high. "Mashed?"

"Do you have gravy?"

"Am I breathing?"

V cracked a smile. "Roger that. And affirmative on the gravy."

When a plate was put in front of him, he glanced up. "No veggies? Not that I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth."

"Vegetable matter is a waste of porcelain space." Phury pushed a knife and fork across the butcher block. "Ask yourself, would I sacrifice the surface area of mashed or stuffing for peas?"

"I love you. ~ J.R. Ward

Back on the block they probably call Big Al "Fat Albert" but here in the Nam we don't insult our friends. ~ Derrick Wolf

Its authors meant it to be ... a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack. ~ Abraham Lincoln

When you come to the fight Don't block the halls and don't block the door, for y'all may go home after round four. ~ Muhammad Ali

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. ~ Stephen King

There certainly are some women who treat their male partners badly, berating them, calling them names, attempting to control them. The negative impact on these men's lives can be considerable. But do we see men whose self-esteem is gradually destroyed through this process? Do we see men whose progress in school or in their careers grinds to a halt because of the constant criticism and undermining? Where are the men whose partners are forcing them to have unwanted sex? Where are the men who are fleeing to shelters in fear for their lives? How about the ones who try to get to a phone to call for help, but the women block their way or cut the line? The reason we don't generally see these men is simple: They're rare.
I don't question how embarrassing it would be for a man to come forward and admit that a woman is abusing him. But don't underestimate how humiliated a woman feels when she reveals abuse; women crave dignity just as much as men do. If shame stopped people from coming forward, no one would tell. ~ Lundy Bancroft

I have to admit, for a second it was sort of turning me on, because I kept imagining Georgia in a very positive light. She was donning designer swimwear with fringe or whatever and she was lying on her stomach with the bikini-top straps untied. I was lathering her up with sun block and my hands were getting into all the cracks and crevices. The image got me pretty excited, and before I knew it, I had an erection. At first I thought it would go away, but it kept getting worse, like harder in that painful way. So that's when I did something a little weird – I started barking at it. Like a Great Dane or a pit bull or whatever. I literally barked at my erection! And it worked, I'm not kidding. ~ Adam Rapp

The music lets me see the story but the story doesn't let me write the words. ~ Elizabeth J. Kolodziej

Try to write tests that force exceptions, and then add behavior to your handler to satisfy your tests. This will cause you to build the transaction scope of the try block first and will help you maintain the transaction nature of that scope. ~ Robert C. Martin

not only did foil fail to block radio waves, it actually amplified certain frequencies - notably frequency bands allocated to the U.S. government for GPS communications. ~ Rob Brotherton

My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back into your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage. ~ June Jordan

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth.

Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie.

Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. ~ Ian McDonald

My family was always active, and our thing was family walks. Not walks around the block, but more like eight-mile hikes up mountains. ~ Mika Brzezinski

All the things that girls feel they are not when they fear that if they become, if they are, they will no longer be loved by the sisters whose hearts they have not meant to break. And besides, if the sisters are gone and only the beloved remains with his dense curls and his lips, how safe are you then? You have to have him or you will die if the sisters are gone with their listening ears and their feet to rub and their bodies to dress and their shared loneliness. ~ Francesca Lia Block

I had thought of annihilating the entire block that I lived on. ~ Edmund Kemper

It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn't strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I really need to remember to block my thoughts."
"Oh, come on," he pulled me closer towards him. "Why are you so scared?"
"Because the second that I let this conversation happen, I'll be letting my walls down. No matter what answer you give me, you'll have some sort of power over me, and I don't want that." I pushed past him, plopping down on the bed, not bothering to remove my boots.
I could feel the mattress sink beside me. Ian ran his fingers through my hair. "Come here," he spoke softly. "Please." I pushed myself into a sitting position, and moved closer to him, leaning my head on Ian's shoulder. "I like this, a lot. It feels nice." Ian lifted my chin so that I was forced to look directly at him, and then he leaned in to kiss me. ~ Nicole Sobon

I was usually on xylophone. On my worst days she gave me a wooden block and a drumstick and tried to convince me that was a valid musical instrument. ~ Corey Ann Haydu

There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head.

So many dudes I've dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize
and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.)

They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I "get them" more than anyone they've ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks.

None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can't cure.

They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about.

Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice.

They don't want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real.

So they invite me over when they're going through writer's block but don't answer m ~ Lora Mathis

Our perceptions shape whether challenges are obstacles that block our path to success or important arrows that steer us in the direction we want to go. ~ Julie Connor

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests. ~ Alice Sebold

Falsehood is difficult to be maintained. When the materials of a building are solid blocks of stone, very rude architecture will suffice; but a structure of rotten materials needs the most careful adjustment to make it stand at all. ~ Richard Whately

If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground. ~ Paul Samuelson

Tried to escape, to block out the fact that I was being eaten alive by arachnids. For some reason the only thing I could replace it with was the image of being eaten by tiny clowns. ~ David Wong

For what it's worth, I know how you feel," Conner told him. "I used to doubt myself a lot. When people told me I wasn't good enough, I believed them. It's hard not to when you're young."
"Tell me about it," Bold said. "Does it get better when you're older?"
"It did for me," Conner said.
"How?" Bolt asked.
"Someone else believed in me," Conner said. "All it took was one person's approval and suddenly I believed myself, too. It gave me a shield to block out all the doubt and negativity. It made me realize I was just as capable and deserving as the people I compared myself to. But you know what? I was wrong."
"You were?" Bolt asked.
"Totally," Conner said. "I didn't need someone else. I had confidence in myself, deep down inside, the whole time. Approval is just a shortcut to self-worth, but sometimes we have to find things out on your own. Sometimes if we want something bad enough, we have to inspire ourselves to get it. Sometimes we have to be our own superhero."
Out of everything Conner said, he could tell this resonated with the boy the most. If he wanted to help people, maybe he had to start with himself.
"But what if I fail?" Bolt asked. "What if the Snake Lord wins and I don't save anyone? Then I'll never be a superhero."
"A very wise man once told me that 'courage is what makes a superhero super,'" Conner said. "He never sad anything about succeeding. ~ Chris Colfer

If you deny yourself access to the child within because you're too serious, you also block your connection to the divine Light and your feminine self. Every creator who's any good uses their feminine side to create with.. Whether a scientist working on a hunch, a painter working on the interplay of colors, or a musician dealing with the juxtaposition of notes and chords. ~ Stuart Wilde

If the artist starts evaluating himself, it's an enormous block, isn't it? ~ Philip Guston

Many later commented on the fact that large numbers of those engaged in the most senseless acts of destruction were left well alone by cops, indeed people dressed as Black Block members were seen freely making their way across police lines and talking to cops. ~ John Blair

She pushed the gardener away and called for them. In her sleep she had seen love. It was poisoning. It was possessing. Devouring. Or it was seven pairs of boots climbing up the stairs to find her. ~ Francesca Lia Block

It's important for young men and women who look at the Nebraska champs to understand that quality of life is more than just blocking shots. ~ George W. Bush

Most things are beyond me," Block said. "I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood, ~ Flannery O'Connor

The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot. ~ Benny Lewis

A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time. ~ Seth Shostak

And so I make my way across the room steadily, carefully. Hands shaking, I pull the string, lifting my blinds. They rise slowly, drawing more moonlight into the room with every inch
And there he is, crouched low on the roof. Same leather jacket. The hair is his, the cheekbones, the perfect nose . . . the eyes: dark and mysterious . . . full of secrets. . . . My heart flutters, body light. I reach out to touch him, thinking he might disappear, my fingers disrupted by the windowpane.
On the other side, Parker lifts his hand and mouths:
"Hi."
I mouth "Hi" back.
He holds up a single finger, signalling me to hold on. He picks up a spiral-bound notebook and flips open the cover, turning the first page to me. I recognize his neat, block print instantly: bold, black Sharpie. I know this is unexpected . . . , I read. He flips the page.
. . . and strange . . .
I lift an eyebrow.
. . . but please hear read me out.
He flips to the next page.
I know I told you I never lied . . .
. . . but that was (obviously) the biggest lie of all. The truth is: I'm a liar.
I lied.
I lied to myself . . .
. . . and to you.
Parker watches as I read. Our eyes meet, and he flips the page.
But only because I had to.
I wasn't supposed to fall in love with you, Jaden . . .
. . . but it happened anyway.
I clear my throat, and swallow hard, but it's squeezed shut again, tight.
And it gets worse.
Not only am I ~ Katie Klein

Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating. ~ Terence McKenna

Don't let fear block God's destiny for you. ~ T.D. Jakes

that feeling you might call "writer's block" is actually fear. The ~ Robert Maurer

My blood G cold, never seen my dad cry. And I'm a bleed your block til the cash dry! ~ Vinnie Paz

Thinking about the things that happened, I don't know any other ball player would could have done what he (Jackie Robinson) did. To be able to hit with everybody yelling at him. He had to block all that out, block out everything but this ball that is coming in at a hundred miles an hour and he's got a split second to make up his mind if it's in or out or down or coming at his head, a split second to swing. To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I've ever seen in sports. ~ Pee Wee Reese

Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working? ~ Stewart Brand

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block. ~ Joni Mitchell

No matter how bad things get, you can always see the beauty in them. The worse things get, the more you have to make yourself see the magic in order to survive. ~ Francesca Lia Block

The other part of seeing what is on the block is appreciating how limited our own view is. We are limited by our sensory abilities, by our species membership, by our narrow attention - at least the last of which can be overcome. ~ Alexandra Horowitz

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. ~ Jennifer Egan

If there is anything that I could get you to do, it would be to spend ten to fifteen minutes each morning planning your day. If I could get you to do that, you'd not only scare yourself, you'd intimidate everybody on your block. ~ Hyrum W. Smith

She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore. ~ Lawrence Block

Consider the sexual harassment which continually occurs between a secretary and a boss ... while objectionable to many women, [it] is not a coercive action. It is rather part of a package deal in which the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job, and especially when she agrees to keep the job. The office is, after all, private property. The secretary does not have to remain if the 'coercion' is objectionable. ~ Walter Block

Unlike the Marxists, I have no mind block against the U.S. ~ Mamata Banerjee

Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it. ~ Dorothy Parker

Marriage is a sleepy guard to which one confides one's dearest treasure, love. ~ Libbie Block

For a healthy alternative to buffalo wings, slide the bone of a human finger into a block of tofu and bake. ~ Giada De Laurentiis

But you know, I always said that no one else on my block was on the radio, and it was fun. ~ Ed Bradley

He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power. ~ Salvador De Madariaga

This conversation" - Dez rapped her knuckles against the Formica table- "is over."
"Be careful, Dez," Jimmy stated earnestly.
"And don't sleep with him the first night," Vinny warned. "We know what a slut you can be."
Dez turned to Sal. "Do you have anything to add to this bullshit?"
"Yeah." Sal looked down from the ceiling he'd been staring at. "Based on the structure of this building, if we removed that pillar back there, we could take out this whole block."
Dez sighed. ~ Shelly Laurenston

Faith in God is the instrument which enables men and women to remove the hills of difficulty which block their path. ~ William Barclay

The best cure for cranial constipation is emotional fiber. Feel 'something', anything.
Pain, anger, joy; if your heart goes eerily cold or leaps erratically from your chest, your synaptic bowels will soon find release. ~ Muse

Rules of Order state that ... No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organisation ... but No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become the majority. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

(On her son) I've met writer's block. He is short, diapered and keeps unplugging my laptop. Good news: he can be conquered with a bottle and a nap. ~ Cyrese Covelli

Offense cuts you off from God. We separate ourselves from the pipeline. I've never seen anything block blessings from Heaven except offense. ~ John Bevere

If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline. ~ R.L. Stine

Why else were we here except to love? ~ Francesca Lia Block

Some of the guys said he's been macking on this little brunette who works in operations."

"What, are you jealous?"

Oh my God, why did I say that?

As the SOG, or Special Operations Group, team leader, Colt was one of the few men who knew what Meg really did for the CIA.
He'd been around the block a few times, and with multiple tours in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, he had a disarming manner
that Meg found sexy. It didn't hurt that he was good-looking and believed she was an asset for the Algiers station.


The only problem was that he treated Meg like she was his little sister.

"Why would I be jealous?" he asked with a confused look that annoyed the hell out of Meg ~ Sean Parnell

We Don't Need to Leave Yet, Do We? Or, Yes We Do

One kind of person when catching a train always wants to allow an hour to cover the ten-block trip to the terminus,
And the other kind looks at them as if they were verminous,
And the second kind says that five minutes is plenty and will even leave one minute over for buying the tickets,
And the first kind looks at them as if they had cerebral rickets.
One kind when theater-bound sups lightly at six and hastens off to the play,
And indeed I know one such person who is so such that it frequently arrives in time for the last act of the matinee,
And the other kind sits down at eight to a meal that is positively sumptuous,
Observing cynically that an eight-thirty curtain never rises till eight-forty, an observation which is less cynical than bumptious.
And what the first kind, sitting uncomfortably in the waiting room while the train is made up in the yards, can never understand,
Is the injustice of the second kind's reaching their scat just as the train moves out, just as they had planned,
And what the second kind cannot understand as they stumble over the first kind's heel just as the footlights flash on at last
Is that the first kind doesn't feel the least bit foolish at having entered the theater before the cast.
Oh, the first kind always wants to start now and the second kind always wants to tarry,
Which wouldn't make any difference, except ~ Ogden Nash

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph. ~ Ella Fitzgerald

Jewish voters are not one homogenous block. ~ Ken Livingstone

Well, I get my subject on Wednesday night; I think it out carefully on Thursday, and make my rough sketch; on Friday morning I begin, and stick to it all day, with my nose well down on the block. ~ John Tenniel

The desire to create holds an element of hope. Success proves that Hope is not a by-product of living; it is a Building Block of life."
Francesca Quarto ~ Francesca Quarto

When you play in the Premier League, say you're playing against a lower-end team, they set up to defend all the time, they set up to block you off. But when you play in the Champions League, all the other teams are used to winning every week, so it's more of an open game, it's more attacking, end-to-end. ~ Gareth Bale

Nothing should become a stumbling block in your relationship with the people who surround you ~ Sunday Adelaja

I'm never going to do it again", she said. "Never."
"All right, " Andy said, and put a hand on her shoulder. "All right, Charlie".
"Never, " she repeated with quiet emphasis.
"You don't want to say that, button," Irv said, looking up at her. "You don't want to block yourself off like that. You'll do what you have to do. You'll do the best you can. And that's all you can do. I believe the one thing the God of this world likes best is to give the business to people who say 'never.' You understand me?"
"No," Charlie whispered.
"But you will, I think," Irv said, and looked at Charlie with such deep compassion that Andy felt his throat filled with sorrow and fear. ~ Stephen King

The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

I love New York. I can walk half a block and I'm at the grocery store. I don't have to drive anywhere. ~ Camren Bicondova

I don't actually like blocking actors. I prefer giving actors freedom. They don't have to step on a precise mark with me. Instead of giving marks to the actors I like to give marks to the camera. ~ Jose Padilha

Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it. ~ Joan Didion

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Munroe stared at the sky. Cursed her weakness, her inability to block out what it would mean to knowingly deliver the innocent into the same hell that had birthed her to life. In this moment of decision she condemned to death the one she would risk anything to save. To the night, Munroe whispered good-bye. Opened the floodgates to Gehenna - that place of the wicked, that place of the dead - and here in this deserted spot, she buried her soul. ~ Taylor Stevens

I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't. ~ Anthony Kiedis

What did it mean for us? Because everything I did, everything that happened to me, that was what I asked myself - what does this mean for us. It meant that I was farther away from you, different. It meant that if we let ourselves, we could get closer than we had ever been. Disappear into each other. You'd bleed and I wouldn't. Then we both would. ~ Francesca Lia Block

Understanding the intentions of a play is so key because you can block a guy into the running back if you don't know how the play is supposed to work or where the back is going to come out. ~ D'Brickashaw Ferguson

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. ~ Katha Pollitt

We no longer believe in fairy tales. But we will learn to believe in monsters ~ Francesca Lia Block

Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries. ~ Jerry Saltz

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself. ~ Lawrence Block

Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares. ~ Charles Yu

There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals - 220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears. ~ Bill Bryson

Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating. ~ Francesca Lia Block

Every day there's a lot of things I block out, because if I start visualising things, I tend to go completely insane. I've always had anxiety issues, and it can totally overwhelm me and suck me under if I'm not keeping focused. I just think and think until I have a panic attack, and then it dies down. ~ Dev Hynes

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice. ~ Dave Gibbons

Oh, hell," Kelsier said. "There's actually a God?"
"Yes."
Kelsier decked him.
It was a good, clean punch, thrown from the shoulder while he brought his other arm up to block a counter strike. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Sometimes writing is hard. You know what's not hard? Watching Netflix. That's easy. ~ Beth Revis

We're built of contradictions, all of us. It's those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I'll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off. ~ Mark Lawrence

When the ink runs dry, you're most likely writing at the wrong angle. ~ Carolyn Shields

There must be a way to fight this. To block out the black thoughts and make the voices go away. But with each memory fading, their hold on me strengthens. Soon the person I was, still am, will be gone. I'll be hollow. ~ Jeyn Roberts

"You're thinking too much, as usual," I said.
A dismissive snort as he got to his feet. He tried running again, and didn't fall, but did more lurching than loping, his legs threatening to tangle at every step.
"Apparently this could take a while, so how about you practice and I'll head back to the house - "
He darted past me and veered to block my path.
I smiled. "I knew that'd work. So as I right? It's better when you act, not think?"
A sigh whistled out of his nostrils, condensation hanging in the frigid air.
"You hate that, don't you? We should keep a scorecard, see who's right more often: me or you."
He rolled his eyes.
"Not a chance, huh? You'd never live it down if I beat you. But I am right this time. Your body knows how to move as a wolf. You just need to shut your brain off and let your muscles do their thing." ~ Kelley Armstrong

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal.
The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments.
If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, to ~ Meredith Mileti

Bucky's garage was a two-bay cinder block structure that sat like an island in a sea of cars. New cars, old cars, smashed cars, rusted cars, cars that had signed on for the vital organ program, ~ Janet Evanovich

Both bonobos and common chimps are as close to humans as foxes are to dogs. I don't know about you, but that's closer than I feel to some of my human relatives. ~ Susan Block

What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the "lower" animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block? ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter