Minor Spoiler Quotes

He guides my fingers under his hair to the nape of his neck. To the shape of a crescent moon. ~ Paula Weston

Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy. ~ Salman Rushdie

My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera. ~ Amy Bloom

You know, I've never understood it. They make a deal with the devil herself and then expect me to bail them out of every minor scrape. Then when I show up to help them, they cop an attitude and tell me to blow. So if I'm selfish for wanting four days a year to be left alone, then I'm just a selfish bastard. Sue me. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

He wouldn't mention, now or then, the illegal nine-millimeter automatic he had in his pocket. Why distress the woman you loved with minor details? ~ J.D. Robb

I went to performing arts high school, and I took dance and acting every day. Then, I went to Marymount Manhattan College and I have a B.A. in acting, with a concentration in theater performance and a minor in musical theater. I studied there for three years. ~ Jenna Ushkowitz

Where, then, is any particular gene - say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance - or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits. ~ James Gleick

Though there're minor side effects in male adults."
"What side effect?"
She cocked an eyebrow and lowered her voice. "Spontaneous prolonged erection, big guy ... in some test subjects," she added clinically. "A lot of those early tests were done on gorillas ...
"I'm not a gorilla."
She glanced down the front of his lab coat. "Not yet. ~ Ophelia London

Minor parties are, on the other hand, generally deficient in political faith. As they are not sustained or dignified by a lofty purpose, they ostensibly display the egotism of their character in their actions. They glow with a factitious zeal; their language is vehement, but their conduct is timid and irresolute. The means they employ are as wretched as the end at which they aim. Hence it arises that when a calm state of things succeeds a violent revolution, the leaders of society seem suddenly to disappear, and the powers of the human mind to lie concealed. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Spoiler alert: Boys are savages. ~ Nicola Yoon

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry:

Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor.

Yes, "smallpox was. ~ Steven Pinker

We've had such thorough training, we've had an excellent team on the ground. With the minor glitches that have occurred, we've been able to take care of them. And the teams on the ground are getting tons of incredible data. ~ Laurel Clark

You mentioned that Palermo, the part of Buenos Aires where you were brought up, had been a violent place full of bohemians and bandits. There they had two names for the knife, 'the blade' and 'the slicer'. The two names described the same object, but 'the blade' was the thing itself, and 'the slicer' described its function. 'The blade' could fit in the hand even of a sickly child shut up in his father's library, 'the blade' could be any of the superannuated daggers and swords belonging to his warrior grandfather or great-grandfather and displayed on the walls of his house, but 'the slicer', the knife in the hand slicing back and forth, in and out, existed only in his imagination, in a fascinating world of rapid settlings of accounts and duels over honor, an insult or a woman, in dark street where you never went, where no writer went, except in the literature he wrote.

'I've always felt that in order to be a great writer, one should have the experience of life at sea, which is why Conrad and Melville and, in a way, Stevenson, who ended his days in the South Seas, were better than all of us, Vogelstein. At sea, a writer flees from the minor demons and faces only the definitive ones. A character in Conrad says that he has a horror of ports because, in port, ships rot and men go to the devil. He meant the devils of domesticity and incoherence, the small devils of terra firma. But I think that having experience of "the slicer" would give a writer the same sensation as g ~ Luis Fernando Verissimo

St John had always been a fan of the RS Turbo, mainly due to the colour coded rear spoiler and air vents in the bonnet, which distinguished it from the more common and less powerful XR3i. ~ St John Morris

No walking! No standing, no bending, no moving, no accessing the Shadow Roads, nothing. You don't swim for an hour after eating, you don't swan around like an idiot for an hour after narrowly avoiding death.'
'Toby does,' said Quentin.
'Toby is genetically predisposed to swan around like an idiot,' Jin shot back. 'Now sit. ~ Seanan McGuire

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else ~ Richard Selzer

If any immigrants are found guilty of crime the punishment, for a minor crime such as shoplifting, should be double that of someone born or bred here.
A bit harsh? Not really. The country will have bent over backwards to offer them assistance, they'll have cost the British taxpayer money, and if they repay that by committing crime then they need to be sorely punished. The British Taxpayer who's helped them should feel safe from any criminal activities that they themselves are inadvertently funding ~ Karl Wiggins

Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. ~ Paul Davies

Big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details. ~ John Wooden

How many other old enemies were in this crowd? Percy began to realize that every battle he'd ever won had only been a temporary victory. No matter how strong or lucky he was, no matter how many monsters he destroyed, Percy would eventually fail. He was only one mortal. He would get too old, too weak, or too slow. He would die. And these monsters ... they lasted forever. They just kept coming back. Maybe it would take them months or years to re-form, maybe even centuries. But they would be reborn.
Seeing them assembled in Tartarus, Percy felt as hopeless as the spirits in the River Cocytus. So what if he was a hero? So what if he did something brave? Evil was always here, regenerating, bubbling under the surface. Percy was no more than a minor annoyance to these immortal beings. They just had to outwait him. Someday, Percy's sons or daughters might have to face them all over again. ~ Rick Riordan

[Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for living and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving around a minor star which is in turn one of unnumbered galaxies... The astronomer tells us.... this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final state of equilibrium in which nothing more can happen. Aeons and aeons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange creatures that inhabited the primeval earth. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

As a 20th round pick nothing was handed to me in the minor leagues. ~ Mike Lowell

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. ~ Stephen Hawking

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom
less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

My plea is that as we continue our search for truth, particularly we of the Church, that we look for strength and goodness rather than weakness and failings in those who did so great a work in their time. We recognize that our forefathers were human. They doubtless made mistakes. Some of them acknowledged making mistakes. But the mistakes were minor when compared with the marvelous work which they accomplished. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or
circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise
perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial
inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but
(frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view"
that some people with soft skins find " offensive. " It is the deep
and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth
and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from
even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority
puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by
insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates
a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments -
scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never
be made whole - are then taken to be the standard of what is
normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt
her - inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth - is seen as a
consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a
piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently
loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences
and ~ Andrea Dworkin

The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities. ~ Emile Zola

I was stunned. I'm not sure why. I think I just never expected him to be importante enough to make any significant changes in his life, but of course, he doesn't know that he's only a minor character in my life. He's the star of his own life, and I'm the minor character. and fair enough too. ~ Liane Moriarty

We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I'm sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

You think if I haven't had your religious experience I can't appreciate the magnificence of your god. But it's just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think, his god is too small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years
hardly worth the attention of a minor deity, much less the Creator of the universe. ~ Carl Sagan

MAGHRIBI: Learning is in activity. Learning through words alone is minor activity. ~ Idries Shah

Everything assumes a different intensity when you are feeling the pain of loss. Be prepared. A minor annoyance that you might once have managed with a shrug now becomes a nuclear crisis! You are no doubt going to do things perfectly imperfectly. That is part of our path as humans. Forget about striving for perfection while dealing with grief! If you beat yourself up every time you forget something, have a breakdown, or don't do something correctly then you're going to end up very black and blue. I guarantee you won't want to look in the mirror! So be kinder and more patient with yourself. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor ... . Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281). ~ Minor White

That's the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there's something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three. ~ Nora Ephron

Keepers and Seekers were not permitted to do more than trim their hair to elbow length. Ashyn said they ought to be grateful they weren't like the spirit talkers, who weren't ever allowed to cut their hair or their nails. Personally, Moria would be more concerned with the "eyes plucked out, tongue cut off, and nostrils seared" part of being a spirit talker, but she could see that the uncut nails might be inconvenient as well. ~ Kelley Armstrong

Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that's all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual. ~ Margaret Atwood

Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

Houellebecq has created a new genre - the dystopian conversion tale. Submission is not the story some expected of an armed coup d'état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. At one level it is simply about a man who through suffering and indifference finds himself slouching toward Mecca. At another level, though, it is about a civilization that after centuries of a steady, almost imperceptible sapping of inner conviction finds itself doing the same thing. The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemmour's Le Suicide français is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here - no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq's fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever. ~ Mark Lilla