Gregor The Overlander Quotes

As miserable as Gregor felt about being dumped with a rat, his heart ached for Vikus. He wanted to scream at Luxa, "Say something! Don't let your granpa fly off like this! Four of us aren't coming back!" But the words caught in his throat. Part of him wasn't ready to forgive Vikus for abandoning them, either.
"Fly you high, Gregor the Overlander," said Vikus.
Gregor struggled with how to respond. Should he ignore Vikus? Let him know that none of them, not even an Overlander, could forgive him? Just as he had steeled himself against replying, Gregor thought of the last two years, seven months, and was it fifteen days now? There were so many things he wished he'd said to his dad when he'd had the chance. Things like how special it was when they went on the roof at night and tried to find the stars. Or how much he loved it when they took the subway out to the stadium to watch a baseball game. Or just that he felt lucky that out of all the people in the world, his dad was his dad.
He didn't have room inside him for any more unspoken words. The bats were rising into the air. He only had a second. "Fly you high, Vikus!" he yelled. "Fly you high!"
Vikus turned back, and Gregor could see tears shining on his cheeks. He lifted up a hand to Gregor in thanks.
And then they were gone. ~ Suzanne Collins

Beware, Underlanders, time hangs by a thread.
The hunters are hunted, white water runs red.
The Gnawers will strike to extinguish the rest.
The hope of the hopeless resides in a quest.
An Overland warrior, a son of the sun,
May bring us back light, he may bring us back none.
But gather your neighbors and follow his call
Or rats will most surely devour us all.
Two over, two under, of royal descent,
Two flyers, two crawlers, two spinners assent.
One gnawer beside and one lost up ahead.
And eight will be left when we count up the dead.
The last who will die must decide where he stands.
The fate of the eight is contained in his hands.
So bid him take care, bid him look where he leaps,
As life may be death and death life again reaps. ~ Suzanne Collins

Doors are for those who lack enemies. ~ Suzanne Collins

You asked why the rate hate Overlanders so deeply. It is because they know one will be the warrior of the prophecy," said Vikus.
"Oh, I see," said Gregor. "So, when's he coming?"
Vikus fixed his eyes on Gregor. "I believe he is already here. ~ Suzanne Collins

Well, I've spent a lot of time in your libraries at night," said Ripred.
"You come up and read books?" asked Gregor.
"Read them, eat them, whatever mood strikes me," he said. ~ Suzanne Collins

The rat was merely trying to sleep. Believe me, pup, if I had wanted to kill you we wouldn't be having this conversation, said Ripred. ~ Suzanne Collins

There was nothing to do but keep moving forward and make the moments count. ~ Suzanne Collins

Gregor flushed as he went on: "The entire content of the Confesions could be put into one single sentence in the book: when Augustine addresses God, saying: 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is unquiet until it rests in Thee.' This sentence, my lords and friends, is immortal. It contains the very heart of religion. ~ Louis De Wohl

The loudness of tone in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly effective in communicating tension and frustration, but the style does of course have its related limitations. It precludes the use of the small suggestive detail or the quiet but telling observation that Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot are so good at. In such a fortissimo performance
as this, the pianissimo gets drowned out, or noted only as an incongruity (which helps to account for the book's moments of unintended comic bathos). Again, it makes the whole question of modulation of tone a difficult one,6 and it is also hard to manage irony elegantly, as the Brocklehurst and Ingram portraits show.
There is unconscious ambiguity but little deliberate irony in Jane Eyre. Hence the remarkable unity of critical interpretation of the book - the reader knows all too well what he is meant to think about the heroine and the subsidiary characters. The novel does not merely request our judicious sympathy for the heroine, it demands
that we see with her eyes, think in her terms, and hate her enemies, not just intermittently (as in David Copperfield) but in toto. It was, incidentally, because James Joyce recognised the similar tendency of Stephen Hero that he reshaped his autobiographical material as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, retaining the 'first-person effect' but building in stylistic and structural
irony that would guard against the appearance of wholesale authorial endorsement of Stephen. ~ Ian Gregor

Ser Gregor, it went, Dunsen, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei. She ended it with valar morghulis, ~ George R R Martin

The only time in history Keanu Reeves' acting would have been considered appropriate is if he were the first human being on earth. But then you have to consider that the flowers would wilt. ~ Gregor Collins

Her gaze flickered to the balcony doors and back, her brows knitted in confusion. "My balcony doesn't connect to yours."
"I jumped." He grinned at the flash of concern he saw in "her eyes. "At dinner, your grandmother informed me that you'd be moving to the room beside mine. She also mentioned how close my balcony was to yours; so close that even an old lady like herself could leap between the two without the least effort."
Venetia's cheeks heated and she pulled her nightgown closer. "Grandmama is anything but subtle."
"Almost as subtle as your mother."
"Oh, no! Not Mama, too."

Gregor paused beside a small table to pick up a silver tray holding a cut crystal decanter and matching glasses and set it on the table before Venetia. "Your mother was concerned I might be afraid of heights. She told me that if she were thinking of jumping between the balconies and couldn't bring herself to make the leap, it might be possible to pick the lock on the connecting door with, say, a cravat pin."
Venetia blushed. "I'm surprised they aren't in here now, throwing rose petals before you as you walk."
"I would never countenance petal tossing. Too showy. ~ Karen Hawkins

If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually be at the station by eight o'clock. ~ Franz Kafka

Now that's worth the trip right there." He chuckled, pink starting to sparkle in his eyes. "How goes it, Gregor? Forgot your manners, did you? If I'd known you were balanced in such a precarious state, I might have taken even ... longer."
I'd yanked a sheet between us and made Gregor pick up his hips, but the rest of him stayed where it was so I could keept that knife close to his heart. It left Gregor with his ass sticking up in the air while his face stayed level with mine. I wasn't trying to be funny. Only practical. ~ Jeaniene Frost

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect ... " When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The first unanalysed impression that most readers receive from Jane Eyre is that it has a very violent atmosphere. If this were simply the effect of the plot and the imagined events then sensation novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto or Mrs Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho ought to produce it even more powerfully.
But they do not. Nor do they even arouse particularly strong reader responses. Novelists like Charlotte Brontë or D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, are able quite quickly to provoke marked reactions of sympathy or hostility from readers. The reason, apparently, is
that the narrator's personality is communicating itself through the style with unusual directness. ~ Ian Gregor

Their inability to disengage from work in the evening deprives them of the only possible respite from labor, and life without some kind of rest is torture. The worst irony is that taking care of the verminous Gregor is a filthy chore. Gregor, by escaping work, has not only forced his former dependents into labor, but has become work: disgusting work that only his disgraced family can perform. ~ Franz Kafka

I haven't re-read Kafka for forty years. I had a second read-through when first teaching English at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, but since then have not been tempted to return. The reason for this, I suspect, is that he is a young person's writer, not in the sense that only the young can appreciate him, but because on first exposure he is so comprehensively and unexpectedly formative that you may never feel the need to read him again. He becomes part of you, and your mind and spirit and view of the human condition are inhabited by his stories, his views, and especially his characters: by poor persecuted Josef K., by Gregor Samsa trapped in his rotting shell, by the hunger artist, yearning to find something, anything, that is actually good to eat, by poor K., who can't get into the castle to visit the Authorities. Kafkaesque: a world incomprehensible, alienating and threatening, absurd. We visit it with incomprehension and at our peril, lost at all points, disorientated, inoculated against faith, searchers for meaning in a book - and universe that either has none, or in which it lurks inaccessibly. Once you have read Kafka, you know this. ~ Rick Gekoski

And then there was Tick. Brave little Tick, who had flown into the faces of an army of rats to save his baby sister. Tick - who never spoke much. Tick - who shared her food. Tick - who was after all just a roach. Just a roach who had given all the time she had left so that Boots could have more.
Gregor pressed Boots's fingers against his lips and felt scalding tears begin to slide down his cheeks. He hadn't cried, not the whole time he'd been down here, and there had been plenty of bad stuff. But somehow Tick's sacrifice had crushed whatever thin shell remained between him and sorrow. ~ Suzanne Collins

Living in any other time than the present and living on anyone else's terms but your own is a categorical waste of a human life. ~ Gregor Collins

Dying is easy, getting the dental floss off your finger and into the trash is hard. ~ Gregor Collins

Novels begin and end with, consist of, and indeed in one sense are nothing but voices. So reading is learning to listen sensitively, and to tune in accurately, to varying frequencies and a developing programme.
From the opening words a narrative voice begins to create
its own characteristic personality and sensibility, whether it belongs to an 'author' or a 'character'. At the same time a reader is being created, persuaded to become the particular kind of reader the book requires. A relationship develops, which becomes the essential basis of the experience. In the modulation of the fictive voice,
finally, through the creation of 'author' and 'reader* and their relationship, there is a definition of the nature and status of the experience, which will always imply a particular idea of ordering the world.
So much is perhaps familiar enough, and a useful rhetoric of Voice' has developed. Yet I notice in my students and myself, when its vocabulary is in play, a tendency to become rather too abstract or technical, and above all too spatial and static. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what it can be like to listen to close friends,
talking animatedly and seriously in everyday experience, in order to make sure that a vocabulary which often points only to broad strategies does not tempt us to underplay the extraordinary resourcefulness,
variety and fluctuation of the novelist's voice. ~ Ian Gregor

Each night before sleep, she murmured her prayer into her pillow. "Ser Gregor," it went. "Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei. ~ George R R Martin

Nowhere is the sense of medium felt more strongly, even by the casual reader, than in a story about to end. For the novelist the problem is no longer how to tell his tale, but how to close it down; how to switch imaginative energies which have been used in sustaining the tale, into energies which will not just stop it, but will resolve it. The process of telling must be made to predicate its
own conclusion. For the reader, in sight of an ending, the mode of attention shifts, the rhythm alters, and a pressure of significance begins to build up behind the closing chapters. The pace of the narrative begins to slow, the 'ever after' looms, past and present emerge in ever sharper juxtaposition. It is this heightened attention
to the medium that characterises the ending and we are not surprised to find that for some novelists 'endings' seem to play false to the narrative which leads to them. 'Conclusions are the weak points of most authors', George Eliot wrote, 'but some of the fault must lie in the very nature of a conclusion which is at best a negation'. ~ Ian Gregor

Most animals are like the unfortunate Gregor Samsa after metamorphosis. They are Kafka-creatures, organisms with rich thoughts and emotions but no system for translating what they think into something that they can express to others. ~ Marc Hauser

Gregor, open up, I'm pleading with you.' But Gregor had absolutely no intention of opening the door and complimented himself instead on the precaution he had adopted from his business trips of locking all the doors during the night even at home. ~ Franz Kafka

But it was cold and the headlight trailing off into the night was like the flickering beam of a film projector. The movie was dark, looped footage of a never-ending road. ~ Gregor Xane

The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei. ~ George R R Martin

Is it true?" Devlin asked me. "You're Prince Jaron?"
"KING Jaron, actually. News must travel slower amongst the illiterate." I glared at Gregor with every inch of disdain I felt. "Shouldn't you be groveling to me or bowing or something?"
Gregor smiled. "I think before I have the chance, you will already be dead."
"Ah. So much for all your toasts to my long life. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Her honor will come to no harm at my hands," Jack said.
"'Tis not her honor but her tender heart that I worry about," Alexander said.
"She's a delicate lass," Hugh added.
"Aye," said Gregor. "A Scottish rose."
"Your tender, delicate rose had me ambushed, knocked unconscious, and forced to wed," Jack ground
out. "Facts you all know, if you've spoken to Hamish."
Dougal grinned, his teeth flashing whitely. "She has the devil's own temper, our Fiona does. ~ Karen Hawkins

Oh and I miss you the normal amount too." - Lilianna Gregor
"You're only missing me the normal amount too? Good to know." - Dylan Mead ~ H.R. Willaston

Recognising such dimensions implicit to the reading experience can distract from the immediacy of our response; it can substitute literary archaeology for novelistic reality. That is one pole. But the other extreme is equally limiting. By failing to realise the issues involved in communicating with fictional modes that are different
to our own, in effect we do not read in the fullest sense. Between intellectual pedantry and cultivated ignorance I would pose a third approach to reading - that of the informed imagination. After occupying this position true evaluation can begin. ~ Ian Gregor

Vikus looked at Luxa and opened his arms. She stood, still frozen, staring at him as if he were a complete stranger.
"Luxa, it's your grandpa," said Gregor. It seemed like the best and most important thing to say at the moment. "It's your grandpa."
Luxa blinked. A tiny tear formed at the corner of her eye. A battle took place on her face as she tried to stop the feelings rising up inside her.
The feelings won, and to Gregor's great relief, she ran into Vikus's arms. ~ Suzanne Collins

I experience the same level of intense concentration watching a thrilling tennis match as I do hunched over a heaping pile of warm socks diligently searching for exact matches. ~ Gregor Collins

Individuality is the highest, deepest form of art. ~ Gregor Collins

Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath. ~ Franz Kafka

There is a young fella who works for me, named Brian Unkeless, who's very smart. We're a very small company that has been Brian and me and two assistants, although we're growing a little bit now. He read the [The Hunger Games] book and loved it, and told me I should read it. He had been a fan of the Gregor books. So, I read it and couldn't put it down and couldn't stop thinking about it. I really became obsessed with the thought of producing it, and was completely bothered by the idea that anybody but me could produce it. ~ Nina Jacobson

We National Socialists are enemies, deadly enemies, of the present capitalist system with its exploitation of the economically weak ... and we are resolved under all circumstances to destroy this system. ~ Gregor Strasser

If the machinery for distribution in the present economic system of the world is incapable of properly distributing the productive wealth of nations, then that system is false and must be altered. ~ Gregor Strasser

But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit. ~ Franz Kafka

It would be nice if a single swat made the fly think: 'Whoa. I'm not flying THERE again. But it doesn't. He keeps coming back. Take note, Humans. ~ Gregor Collins

When we discuss a novel it is only partially to hear another person's 'view', it is much more to find out
what we ourselves think in order to possess the text more completely. Such a possession is then a composite one, it is the book itself and the articulated reaction to it. So vivid can be the latter that it is not uncommon to find that the pleasure survives the cause; some novels seem more enjoyable to talk about than to read. ~ Ian Gregor

Ser Gregor the Mountain," she said softly. "Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei." It made her feel queer to leave out Polliver and the Tickler. And Joffrey too. ~ George R R Martin

Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world? ~ Haruki Murakami

The hardest part about life is getting out of our own way; in those often fleeting moments that we actually do, we always see light and peace. ~ Gregor Collins

I hope he remembers everyday why he lost his future. He may spend the rest of his life in prison, but at least his heart is still beating, he can still breathe. He made this choice. He should have to suffer the consequences of it. - Lilianna Gregor ~ H.R. Willaston

Because it is written by a nineteenth-century American, and because of its closeness to the twentieth century, The Portrait of a Lady foregoes Victorian affirmations. The price it pays, however (together with several twentieth-century novels) is that it eventually leaves the reader, along with its heroine, 'en Vair' amid its self-reflections. ~ Ian Gregor