Old Poison Quotes

Long ago Mars was an oasis of running water.Today the Martiansurfaceis a sterile,barren desert. Here on Earth, who knows what climactic knobs we unwittingly turn,which might one day render Earth as dry and lifeless as Mars. (From the cover of Old Poison by Joan Francis) ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

You think I'm with you out of guilt?"
"No, you ass. Of course not. I just mean - "
"You're a nut, MacAllister. I'm with you because I love you."
There it was, out. Three little words. Three of the most common words in the world, but string them together and they were more powerful than any warrant, any extradition papers, or even treaty. Stronger than any magical spell. Had he really never said them aloud to Taylor? ~ Josh Lanyon

A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that, in the old days, God and his angels came to humans in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams. ~ Abraham Lincoln

As technology enables us to upgrade humans, overcome old age and find the key to happiness, won't people care less about fictional gods, nations and corporations, and focus instead on deciphering the physical and biological reality? It might seem so, but in fact things are far more complicated. Modern science certainly changed the rules of the game, yet it did not simply replace myths with facts. Myths continue to dominate humankind, and science only makes these myths stronger. Instead of destroying the intersubjective reality, science will enable it to control the objective and subjective realities more completely than ever before. Thanks to computers and bioengineering, the difference between fiction and reality will blur, as people reshape reality to match their pet fictions. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I had never seen a woman's breasts before, and I doubted if any seven-year-old boy in Craighead County had. Maybe some kid had stumbled upon his mother, but I was certain no boy my age had never had this view. ~ John Grisham

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones - gliding like a Satan - well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes - feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, bl ~ Saul Bellow

She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off. ~ Lauren Groff

The renewal of our natures is a work of great importance. It is not to be done in a day. We have not only a new house to build up, but an old one to pull down. ~ George Whitefield

It's an old copy and it's starting to fall apart, but I hold on to my Handbook because nothing else makes promises like that around here, promises with these words burning inside them: honor, duty, and try. ~ Tupelo Hassman

This is what Achilles will feel like when he is old. And then I remembered: he will never be old. ~ Madeline Miller

I like dogs
Big dogs
Little dogs
Fat dogs
Doggy dogs
Old dogs
Puppy dogs
I like dogs
A dog that is barking over the hill
A dog that is dreaming very still
A dog that is running wherever he will
I like dogs. ~ Margaret Wise Brown

He realized that when he had been afraid to change he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there ~ Spencer Johnson

I will not eat Craster's food, he decided suddenly. "I broke my fast with the men, my lord." Jon shooed the raven off Longclaw. The bird hopped back to Mormont's shoulder, where it promptly shat. "You might have done that on Snow instead of saving it for me," the Old Bear grumbled. The raven quorked. ~ George R R Martin

At one of my old schools, I didn't tell anyone I was doing my first album because I was worried they'd be like, 'Who does she think she is?' So I just let them find out for themselves. ~ Dionne Bromfield

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were. ~ Tom Waits

Yes," he answered, "it's a strain being witty at my age. I'm giving it up. ~ Knut Hamsun

They took away her beautiful clothes, dressed her in an old gray smock, and gave her wooden shoes. ~ Marissa Meyer

A snake bites your ankle.
Recoiling, you scream.
Fearing poison, your mind slips into a dream ...
... where a man bites your ankle.
Expecting no guile,
'Again' softly falls from your lips with a smile.
Yet the man and the snake are the same.
Your perception is only to blame. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Women would be disproportionately affected by the privatization of social security. It is one of the most important safety nets for American women in old age, or in times of disability, to insure financial income for their families. ~ Barbara Mikulski

Like old married people who no longer have anything in common, to do or to talk about, save the same general weight of air to displace and breathe and general oblivious biding earth to bear their weight ... ~ William Faulkner

Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere. ~ Sheldon Whitehouse

The more you nourish the old memories of pain, the more you obstruct the new lights and new truths. ~ Amit Ray

Lorraine insisted on cooking us something to eat, so while she got on with that we found an old cement bucket and made a big bowl of punch.
Blackbeard the pirate used to drink rum and gunpowder, as did most of his men, so we figured a little bit of cement in the punch wouldn't hurt us. Probably take some of the sweetness away. ~ Karl Wiggins

I'm old enough to remember John Kennedy sending a few advisers into Vietnam. I'm very worried we'll get in and we'll get mired down in something we don't have any idea what to do [with]. ~ Jim McDermott

Out into the staff quarters. Over to the entrance to the movie theater. Tohr stopped dead. "If this is another Beaches marathon, I'm going to Bette your ass until you can't sit down."
"Aw, look at you! Trying to be finny."
"Seriously, if you have any compassion in you at all, you'll let me go to bed - "
"I have peanut M&M's up there."
"Not my style."
"Raisinets."
"Feh."
"Sam Adams."
Tohr narrowed his eyes. "Cold?"
"Downright icy."
Tohr crossed his arms over his chest and told himself he was not pouting like a five-year-old. "I want Milk Duds."
"Got 'em. And popcorn."
With a curse, Tohr yanked open the door and ascended into the dimly lit red cave. ~ J.R. Ward

Old friends sometimes need no words to understand each other. ~ William Joyce

If I'd been listening closely, I'd have caught the sound of the gods having a great big old tee-hee at my expense. ~ Sue Grafton

I admit at the beginning that 'popular religion,' 'demotic religion,' the pieties of the common folk, tends to sink to the lowest common denominator, be it in syncretizing saints with old, half-forgotten pagan godlings, or in preferring the nasal whine and the revivalist shoutin' to solid sense and learning, regarding intellect as positively inimical to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But it is in American religious life, especially Protestant American religious life, that things bottom out completely. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes
que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!
while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When people sat in caves, they told stories. It was for sharing, learning, entertaining. Storytelling is as old as we are. It will never die. ~ Mark Rubinstein

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared', 'were lost'? Would it be said that they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them. ~ Charlotte Wood

John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections human beings make, that in spite of everything, we will always make. To quote from the book, 'What he saw in the people was what the old anthropologists called communitas. It wasn't that the people sang and moved. It was their singing and moving together' Singing and moving together, Wood has found a way to express this profound and beautiful idea through fiction. ~ Peter Orner

Whether we are rich or poor, young or old, man or woman, straight or gay: all of us are called to our own brand of personal holiness. ~ James Martin

We have to be aggressive when those we stick up for have no voice. I don't consider it radical to say cruelty is wrong and that animals should be respected. I consider it radical to eat corpses, put electrodes in animals' heads, make elephants live in chains in the circus, and poison animals we consider a nuisance. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

My little hobby. Book Collecting. And yet, old friends, books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive. -Bulldog ~ Corrie Ten Boom

Onua smiled. She knew an old grievance when she heard one. "Then why wear 'em? Get yourself breeches and a shirt like me." Daine gaped at her. "Men's gear? With folk talking about me all the time as is?" Onua shook her head. "You're not home now. The rules have changed." Daine opened her mouth to object - then closed it. She looked at her skirts. To be rid of them, and the petticoats . . . it hit her, really hit her, that she was free of Snowsdale. What could they do to her now? ~ Tamora Pierce

That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace. ~ J.D. Salinger

The first painting that I realised I liked was 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I'm in the city. ~ Carolina Herrera

If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring. ~ David Halberstam

There is a river running through this city and every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth! I want to spend the next eighty years together, eating Doritos and riding bikes. ~ Clementine Von Radics

I'm a religious man. I am Jewish but I believe in all religions. I believe in God and see him as an old man with a big white beard and pray to him every day for a few minutes. ~ Uri Geller

The dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within. ~ Winston Churchill

The first time I went to Helene Hanff's apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer. ~ Jean Hanff Korelitz

If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?

I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'

To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!'

'Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of. ~ L.P. Hartley