Natasha Pulley Quotes

I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive. ~ Natasha Pulley

I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't. ~ Natasha Pulley

It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone. ~ Natasha Pulley

Six saw a caterpillar.'

'What kind?'

'Green, with purple and white zigzags.'

'I see,' Thaniel said slowly. Liking children did not keep him from being perplexed by them. He was recently too old to remember his own childhood with any clarity. 'I imagine that was exciting?'

She glanced up at him warily. 'No. It was just a caterpillar. ~ Natasha Pulley

Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.'

'No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.'

'What?'

'I . . .' Thaniel sighed. 'I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.'

'See? In front of you?'

'Yes. I'm not mad.'

'I didn't think so. All sounds?'

'Yes. ~ Natasha Pulley

The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience. ~ Natasha Pulley

The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence. ~ Natasha Pulley

Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely aging worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet. ~ Natasha Pulley

My uncle is a phrenologist and says that the shape of his skull is typical of a liar. ~ Natasha Pulley

She waited by the blackboard, trying to scrape up enough of her abysmal Japanese to ask what was going on. Lectures were always in English, which was just as well, because she had the linguistic capability of a sea cucumber. As far as she could tell, the word for 'husband' and the word for 'prisoner' were identical. Half the faculty were still worried that she'd got Baron Matsumoto locked away in her attic. ~ Natasha Pulley

Tallis with no pedal, Handel with, even the horrible organ piece that had been written for someone with three hands. He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down. It hadn't. There were doors and doors, and dust, but when the curtains opened and the drapes came off, it was all where he had left it and hardly faded. He took his hands from the keys and sat with them in his lap instead, because his thoughts were echoing in the new space. ~ Natasha Pulley

Is it white wine? Red tastes like vinegar.'

'Of course it's white wine, I'm Japanese. ~ Natasha Pulley

The Ancient Greeks? If they had steam engines, why didn't they have trains?'
. . .
'They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.'
(p. 76) ~ Natasha Pulley

What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment. ~ Natasha Pulley

Your science can save a man's life, but imagination makes it worth living. ~ Natasha Pulley

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was. ~ Natasha Pulley

The cab took them past other libraries and townhouses, then the redbrick walls of Keble College with their zigzag patterns, which looked ridiculous and spoke, Grace suspected, of the general unavailability of proper Cotswolds sandstone. ~ Natasha Pulley

The water in the drains below the cobbles muttered. ~ Natasha Pulley

Thaniel wondered if real geisha painted themselves white so that it was harder to see how angry they must be all the time. ~ Natasha Pulley

It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there. ~ Natasha Pulley

Stop looking at it as an impossible thing and start looking at it as a thing that must be done. ~ Natasha Pulley

As to why you've got it, silly things help with nerves. ~ Natasha Pulley

. . .She started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. . .
(p. 121) ~ Natasha Pulley

Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure. ~ Natasha Pulley

Chivalry - Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it's a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human being so you'd feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don't say it to grown-ups. ~ Natasha Pulley

Being mad isn't an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness? ~ Natasha Pulley

What's the point of you?'
'I'm ornamental.'
'Sit down and don't touch anything. ~ Natasha Pulley

But he hadn't realized that grace is not a thing you performed, but a weight you carried. ~ Natasha Pulley

When a sign says don't walk on the grass, one hops.' He ~ Natasha Pulley

He was not poor - he could afford ten candles & two baths a week. He wasn't going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week. ~ Natasha Pulley

Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour. ~ Natasha Pulley

No,"Ito said gently, "we will not be needing soldiers. Accountants will do nicely."
Mutsuhito frowned. "How does one storm a castle with accountants ?"
"One buys it, sir. ~ Natasha Pulley

I don't tolerate you. I can't breathe when you're not here, I can't think, I can't write music properly, I spend my whole bloody life waiting for the post. ~ Natasha Pulley

People are like bees. They're all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can't be reversed. A bee that's half way a queen can't turn back into a worker. She'd starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave. ~ Natasha Pulley

I'll give you a cake if you get him in the stream by the end of the afternoon,' Mori said to Six.

'Hold on,' Thaniel said. 'No making criminals of the orphans, Fagin.'

'But I want some cake,' Six frowned. 'And his name isn't Fagin. ~ Natasha Pulley

In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude,' the watchmaker explained. ~ Natasha Pulley

Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn't have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing. ~ Natasha Pulley

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future. ~ Natasha Pulley

People shouldn't be throwing away their history when it's still doing archery practice forty miles up the road. ~ Natasha Pulley

What's gone before you, and what will come after,' I said instead.
'Beg pardon?'
'The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they're far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after. ~ Natasha Pulley

Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action, ~ Natasha Pulley

I was very lucky when I started doing comedy because I hadn't seen much stand-up. I just got up on stage and did it without thinking. ~ Natasha Leggero

I overheard things in the Woolworths when I was a child, people saying, 'Oh, poor, little thing,' as if they had some understanding that I was being born biracial into a world that was still very difficult for interracial marriages and biracial children. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Want to know one of the most rewarding and holistic ways to heal & make significant life choices that will fully align? Learning to slow down, breath, think, journal, talk, and process before reacting. Knowing you have worked through the issue, be it mentally, emotionally or spiritually, before taking action lets you write the script of your life how you want. Which in turn gives you the best chance of achieving your dreams ~ Natasha Potter

I don't believe that there are any situations or any person on this planet who can not be helped, whose life can not be made better. And many of these situations can be cured. If your doctor does not know something, it does not mean that the knowledge does not exist elsewhere. No body is beyond hope. No body! ~ Natasha Campbell-McBride

I think people get bored of grief," said Natasha. "It's like you're allowed some unspoken allotted time - six months maybe - and then they get faintly irritated that you're not 'better,' like you're being self-indulgent hanging on to your unhappiness. ~ Jojo Moyes

My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane. ~ Natasha Trethewey

If Da Vinci had to tweet 5 times a day,
we'd still be riding bicycles. ~ Natasha Tsakos

I need advice and opinion-honest opinion. I want to get better. Why go around with blinkers on? ~ Natasha Richardson

There are beauty icons that I can never be like, sorta like a Gena Rowlands - I'll never have that look. I love Giulietta Masina, the great Fellini actress. But I'm probably more Seymour Cassel. Or somewhere between Lou Reed and Nora Ephron? ~ Natasha Lyonne

The pond is clear, but it isn't this beyond the sea blue and has never been. The sky is blue, but it isn't this strikingly bright and vivid nor has it ever been. But together, and in each other's company, they are more beautiful than they could ever have been alone... ~ Anoma Natasha Paleebut

...young Christians are actively being drawn into a worldview battle that wasn't so prominent even 10 years ago. Unfortunately, they're losing their faith in that battle because they haven't been equipped for the fight. If you want to keep your kids on God's side, you'll have to make sure they're armed. ~ Natasha Crain

The more developed your abs, the less time you've spent reading. ~ Natasha Leggero

I am both the singular and the plural. I am what was, what is, and what will be. I am everything that is and isn't. ~ Natasha D. Lane

It's about running wild in a field of exclamation points chasing question marks ~ Natasha Tsakos

The only thing that makes me cry at weddings is the DJ's playlist. ~ Natasha Leggero

What undercuts the power of women's anger in the end is not the melancholy that Butler charts, but material realities - economics, not psychology. While Em fantasizes about the possibility of Afro- and Euro-Jamaican women building partnerships to work for each other, she seems to understand that she has no concrete possibilities for realizing this fantasy in 1920s Jamaica. ~ Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

The Nazi murder squads just wouldn't waste a bullet on a child. I just couldn't process that. I couldn't handle it. ~ Natasha Kaplinsky

Csikszentmihalyi identified four "preconditions" of flow: first, each moment of the activity must have a little goal; second, the rules for attaining that goal must be clear; third, the activity must give immediate feedback so that one has certainty, from moment to moment, on where one stands; fourth, the tasks of the activity must be matched with operational skills, bestowing a sense of simultaneous control and challenge. ~ Natasha Dow Schull

Let pain flow and from pain grow. ~ Natasha Riley-Noah

The store owner had settled himself behind the counter again and was reaching for his
book. "The journey will test your sanity." He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, as though
there were nothing extraordinary about his words. "And once you start walking down
that road, there is no turning back. You will start craving the rush. One can become
addicted to madness, you know. Develop a taste for it." He looked down at the book
in his hands, frowned and turned a page. ~ Natasha Mostert

Give the woman what she wants and maybe her rebellion will subside and she will get down to the business of being a human incubator! ~ Natasha Anders

I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work. ~ Natasha Trethewey

I lay in his arms and I understood. I am two women and I love two men. Elise will always love Kit and Alice loves Daniel. This was not the life or the love I had expected but it was love all the same. ~ Natasha Solomons

Words, Natasha thinks, should behave more like units of measure. A meter is a meter is a meter. Words shouldn't be allowed to change meanings. Who decides that the meaning has changed, and when? Is there an in-between time when the word means both things? Or a time when the word doesn't mean anything at all? ~ Nicola Yoon

Comedy is just one of the many professions that women are taking over. ~ Natasha Leggero

Interviewer (Louise Tucker): What did you want to be when you grew up? Have you always wanted to be a writer?
IllumBerg: When I was a child I was busy being a child. [...] ~ Natasha Illum Berg

He tries not to think about The Core ... but he couldn't deny it ... they were all becoming something else entirely. Darwin's Children ~ Natasha Larry

Remember to be conscious of what seeds you plant, as the garden of your mind is like the world. The longer seeds grow, the more likely they are to become trees. Trees often block the sun's rays from reaching other seeds, allowing only plants that are acclimated to the shadow of the tree to grow - keeping you stuck with that one reality. ~ Natasha Potter

Innovation is the result of a process that brings radical ideas to create positive change ~ Natasha Tsakos

I 'm your husband ... "
"No. You are not my husband," she interrupted in a voice thickened with hatred and tears. "You have never been my husband. A husband loves, honours and cherishes! A husband is a lover and a champion ... Look into the next room if you want to see what a real husband is, because you are no such thing! ~ Natasha Anders

Adam Smith had come into my life like a whirlwind.
He'd swept me off my feet. And then, he'd stolen me away. ~ Natasha Knight

And what some people don't understand was that bleeding wasn't a sign of weakness; it was a sign of strength. It demonstrated to the world that you were vulnerable and ordinary, but when you wanted something enough, and fought hard for it, you were capable of doing extraordinary things. ~ Natasha Ngan

James Franco, acting, teaching, directing, writing, producing, photography, soundtracks, editing - is there anything you can do? ~ Natasha Leggero

The waiters in France could all be senators in the US. ~ Natasha Leggero

Understand that the Cosmos
is not an alien wave of planets
that have no personal connection with you
Look at the stars
Feel them vibrating through your whole body
They are your friends
and are part of your Greater Self

The sky you are looking at is very alive
The stars are not just shining at you
They are beckoning unto you
to be one with them
They are beaming their message
for humanity to join
the Universal balance ~ Natasha Rendell