Riddle Quotes

Encouragement is like oxygen to the human spirit. Don't forget you're carrying someone else's air. Encourage them; help them breathe. ~ Jeremy Riddle

After some while Bilbo became impatient. "Well, what is it?" he said. "The answer's not a kettle boiling over, as you seem to think by the noise you are making. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. ~ Diane Arbus

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. ~ Anne Rice

To get back to the original subject, most dragons prefer to be friends at a distance. Occasionally meet where the edges of our territories join - that sort of thing. Chat, exchange news, perhaps play a round of the riddle game, then go our separate ways. ~ Mercedes Lackey

His two front teeth are slightly crooked, veer just a tiny bit to the right, as if they've decided perfection is overrated. His smile is like unlocking a riddle. How does an imperfection make him seem more perfect? ~ Julie Buxbaum

Think what you thought you knew, hindsight. Now as much as you think you know, you realize you don't, insight. Take heed to what you're abut to learn.
Foresight seen through the third eye, wide open to the light, the real lies are exposed then you realize you can see with your real eyes. ~ Jose R. Coronado

Nix to Declan:

Begin transcript -
Testing. Hello, hellooo, anybody out there? Check, check, one, two. Soft pee. Puh, puh. Resonance! Sooooooft pee. Alpha bravo disco tango duck.
This is Nïx! I'm the Ever-Knowing One, a goddess incandescent, incomparable, and irresistible. But enough about what you think of me. It's a beautiful day in New Orleans. The wind is out of the east at a steady five knots and clouds look like rabbits … But enough about what you think of me!
Now, down to business -
Squirrel!
Where was I? [Long pause] Why am I in Regin's car? Bertil, you crawl right back out of that bong this minute!
Oh, I remember! I am hereby laying down this track for Magister Declan Chase. If you are a mortal of the recorder peon class, know that Dekko and I go waaaaay back, and he'll go berserk (snicker snicker) if he doesn't receive this transmittal. …
Chase, riddle me this: what's beautiful but monstrous, long of tooth but sharp of tooth and soft of mind, and can never ever tell a lie?
That's right. The Enemy of Old can be very useful to you. So use him already.
P.S. Your middle name's about to be spelled r-e-g-r-e-t.
And with that, I must bid you adieu. Don't worry, we'll catch up very soon. …
[Muffled] Who's mummy's wittle echolocator? That's right - you are!
- End transcript ~ Kresley Cole

If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be? ~ Steven Wright

What's the riddle? Me talking so much And saying so little ~ Carrie Fisher

Present and future, Harry Potter ... ' He pulled Harry's wand from his pocket and began to trace it through the air, writing three shimmering words: TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE Then he waved the wand once, and the letters of his name rearranged themselves: I AM LORD VOLDEMORT ~ J.K. Rowling

The sphinx is the riddle, not the riddler. Do you knows what that means?
No. Is it a riddle? ~ George R R Martin

Stephen's work does not call out to him in this way. It does not speak to him of secrets and stories. He wonders about the woman. He imagines a divorce, something that makes her look away rather than stroke her daughter's hair. To know more about her would be to have some riddle solved. An unwritten novel is in each of us, Woolf would say. ~ Maya Lang

Mr. Douglas told us true.
He knows why the sky is blue.
Why the earth spins round and round,
And where the next clue can be found.
Ask him, maybe, will he tell you?
His radio, those ads will sell you.
Peppy song will make you wonder,
If the world is going under.
Bring him something from the doctor-
-Nothing spicy-while he proctors.
It may be those fizzy bubbles,
Let him help you with your troubles. ~ Megan Frazer Blakemore

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Of course money buys happiness. You ever seen a homeless person skip? The answer to that riddle's no. They're not allowed. ~ Daniel Tosh

I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia - that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives - and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. ~ Sigmund Freud

Life is a riddle with no solution.
The more you look for an answer, the more complicated it becomes. ~ Wolf Of Shadow

Michael was still an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, coated in yum. Only now the enigma was a little less mysterious; I was a few clues closer to solving the riddle - but damn, that man would always be coated in yum. ~ Lisa Shearin

Religious leaders and men of science have the same ideals; they want to understand and explain the universe of which they are part; they both earnestly desire to solve, if a solution be ever possible, that great riddle: Why are we here? ~ Arthur Keith

Robert calmly, like an Oriental sage himself, treated the situation as if it were a koan, a riddle to be entered until its very assumptions shifted. ~ Mark Nepo

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, is the most respected, and probably the largest, commercial flight-training school in the nation, I was informed. It's the Notre Dame of the air. ~ Frank W. Abagnale

Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The answer to this riddle has a hole in the middle,
And some have been known to fall in it.
In tennis it's nothing, but it can be received,
And sometimes a person may win it.
Though not seen or heard it may be perceived,
Like princes or bees it's in clover.
The answer to this riddle has a hole in the middle,
And without it one cannot start over. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

I? What am I?" roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf - kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious. ~ Francine Prose

There. That is the answer to this riddle. The promises I can make, and the one I can't. Gwen. I will never leave you willingly. Life is a risk, and so love is, as well. But I swear to God, you will not regret the gamble. ~ Meredith Duran

Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved. ~ Heinrich Heine

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off. ~ Sylvia Plath

This diary holds memories of terrible things. Things that were covered up. Things that happened at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry ~ J.K. Rowling

None of us wanted you to go through the portal because we would never put your life in danger before our own." "Why?" "Because we're adults, and we care about you. We've had a chance to grow up and become what we are. Yours is a life still to be lived, ~ A.G. Riddle

"So I've got to find a mountiain that nobody's ever seen. And work out the answer to a riddle that nobody's ever solved. And kill a bear that nobody can fight."
Renn sucked in her breath. "You've go to try." ~ Michelle Paver

The quickest way to release heaven on earth is to worship. Worship is the main activity of heaven and the destiny of all created things. ~ Jeremy Riddle

I like the old wisdom
puns, riddles, spells, proverbs. ~ Mason Cooley

Nobody ever," said the Dowager sorrowfully, "credits me with normal thought processes. When a mysterious man creates a royal scandal on the banks of the Lake of Menteith with the keenest ears in Scotland strolling utterly oblivious - by her own account - in the locality, I begin to wonder. I also wonder when a delicately reared child sends a court into fits with a riddle which I invented myself. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Because love is a riddle, as is life itself. ~ Corban Addison

It is my dearest hope that one day I shall be the one to discover the GUT-the Grand Unified Tale, the one which will bind together all our Theorems and Laws, leaving out not one Orphan Girl or Youngest Son or Cup of Life and Death. Not one Descent or Ascent, not one Riddle or Puzzle or Trick. One perfect golden map that can guide any soul to its desire and back again. I will be the one to do it, I know it. I hope I know it. I know I hope it. ~ Catherynne M Valente

When you figure out that you're fighting some other man's war, walk away. ~ A.G. Riddle

They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you're going (usually Baker Street - the great majority of modernday seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they're out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck we are looking at. As a kind of preemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question "What you looking at?" and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer - "Nothing" - might be avoided. ~ Zadie Smith

Have you ever solved a riddle you weren't asked? ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. ~ J.M. Barrie

A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality." Kate ~ A.G. Riddle

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle. ~ William James

Seven things has Lady Lackless
Keeps them underneath her black dress
One a ring that's not for wearing
One a sharp word, not for swearing
Right beside her husband's candle
There's a door without a handle
In a box, no lid or locks
Lackless keeps her husband's rocks
There's a secret she's been keeping
She's been dreaming and not sleeping
On a road, that's not for traveling
Lackless likes her riddle raveling. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

He's looking at her like she's the answer to some sort of riddle. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

That's what life is about: finding something you can do that no one else can, and working your hardest at it. It's about finding someone you love like no one else, someone who loves you like no one else does. ~ A.G. Riddle

Leave it to a kid to sum up the state of my career so accurately in two words. And leave it to an adult to rationalize it in three: "It's a living. ~ A.G. Riddle

I know what you are known as ... but to me, you will always be Tom Riddle. It is one of the irritating things about old teachers. I am afraid that they never quite forget their charges' youthful beginnings. ~ J.K. Rowling

That was the big joke, wasn't it? The answer to the riddle: There was no one up there in Heaven, making sure the accounts came out right. I'd solved it, hadn't I? Cracked the code? It was all just a joke. The god inside my brother's head was just his disease. My mother had knelt every night and prayed to her own steepled hands. Your baby died because of ... because of no particular reason at all. Your wife left you because you sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so you pretended she was the one in bed with you while you screwed your girlfriend and her boyfriend hid in the closet, watching. ~ Wally Lamb

The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance. ~ Thomas Huxley

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle ~ Terence McKenna

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it. ~ Chaim Potok

Chet couldn't wipe away his smile. "I have learned much since we parted ways, and one of those lessons is that a static force, even in mass, can be crushed by a dynamic one."

Wellington's face stiffened. "What kind of foolish talk is that?"

"You will find out. On the Fourth of July, as you sit here in your governor's mansion pandering to your public servants - using them to climb into more power, you will learn what it feels like to have everything you believe in shatter before your very eyes."

Wellington shifted irritably in his seat. "What sort of riddle is that, Chet? You and I have been in this political game our entire lives. You know how it works, and that's not going to change. Ever. One party controls the knobs of politics with one hand, and the other party controls the knobs with the other hand. But they are all one body, members of a political ruling class. That's what we do. This isn't anything new."

Chet pushed his brows over his eyes in a gaze that could melt steel. "You will not be able to stop the ramifications of its impact. This thing I'm about to unleash upon you, I'm doing to you because you are an evil man. I used to be, I'll give you that. But I changed, luckily, before death found me. And I will not let you get away with what you are doing to this country."

Wellington was aghast. "So you're involved with terrorism now, are you? What are you going to do?"

Chet shook his head. "The tru ~ Rich Hoffman

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here? ~ Northrop Frye

If then, your world be such a baffling riddle, it is because you are that baffling riddle. And if your speech be such a woeful maze, it is because you are that woeful maze. ~ Mikhail Naimy

In our gradually shrinking world, everyone is in need of all the others. We must look for man wherever we can find him. When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: «Man». That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus. ~ Yorgos Seferis

Riddle me this - she is my daughter but I am not her father: who am I?

I am a step parent. Ah, but I don't really believe in the term step-parent. I don't think the role exists. Not really. For either in the end you are either a child's parent or you are not. And blood does not have a lot do to with it. ~ Tony Parsons

Where are there towns but no houses, roads but no cars, forests but no trees?
Answer on a map
(Riddle on children's breakfast TV) ~ Audur Ava Olafsdottir

her wrist. He grabbed her other wrist ~ A.G. Riddle

Not all that have fallen are vanquished. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Being a kid myself, I loved playing and I loved playing with words, and making up things and riddles and songs and not afraid of being silly in public. ~ Malachy McCourt

Rise and enter the lair, where the darkness gives you your stripes. Tell tyrants, to you, their allegiance they owe," Etta read, running her finger beneath the words within the star. "Seek out the unknown gods whose ears were deaf to lecture. Stand on the shoulders of memory. Bring a coin to the widowed queen. Remember, the truth is in the telling, and an ending must be final. ~ Alexandra Bracken

- "Do you know the difference between us and them.... We are awake. We sense the truth: that something is deeply wrong with the world.... Deep down, they know it too. The feeling ebbs and flows. Some events cover it up for a time: you fall in love, you get a new job, you win the game. You think that's all you needed, that the feeling will go away, but it doesn't. It returns, again and again. Our species has become exceedingly adept at covering up the feeling. We work ourselves to death. We buy things. We go to parties and ball games. We laugh, shout, and cheer - and worse, we fight, and argue, and say things we don't mean. Alcohol and drugs quiet the most acute episodes. But we are constantly keeping the beast at bay. Underneath it all, our subconscious is crying out for help. For a solution - a cure for the root problem. We're all suffering from the same thing."
- "Which is?"
- "We've been told that it's simply the human condition. But that's not true. Our problem is really very simple: the world is not as it seems."
- "Then what is it?"
- "Science gives you one answer. Religious texts offer countless others. But the human population is slowly tiring of those answers. They are starting not to believe. They are awakening - and that awakening will soon tear the world apart. It will be a catastrophe with no equal. ~ A.G. Riddle

Life is a puzzle, a riddle, a test, a mystery, a game - whatever challenge you wish to compare it to. Just remember, you're not the only participant; no one person holds all the answers, the pieces, or the cards. The trick to success in this life is to accumulate teammates and not opponents. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I look back at the thousands of days through which I have lived, and feel awed by their inconsequentiality. My life resembles the writing in my diary (or perhaps it's the other way around): the days, like the sentences, each making a kind of superficial sense of their own, but in the context of the surrounding sentences and days, creating not a narrative or a meaning, but the very opposite: a riddle without solutions, a labyrinth without exits. A chaos. ~ Sam Taylor

There is no neatness in any life- great or small. It is only an illusion men foolishly pursue.
All lived lives are a mess.
The neatness in my life had begun to crumble some time before, but now it disintegrated completely as I vanished into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries.
For the first time I began to understand how shallow neatness is.
How cramping, how limiting.
For the first time I understood neat lives are comatose lives. (the Alchemy of Desire 304) ~ Tarun J. Tejpal

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead. ~ David Wong

I know all about you from your books,' she said. 'But in spite of that you're still a riddle to me.'
Have you come here to solve it?' I asked. ~ Maxim Biller

Human existence, or one's manifestation of it, is the greatest riddle of all. Many people will pursue this curiosity through insurmountable tragedies to get to the unanswerable other side. ~ Barbara Boyer

For the answer you seek,
Look up. ~ Megan Frazer Blakemore

One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promise, rousing such longing: an evening star, a bluebell, a lake green with reeds, the eye of a human being or of a cow, and at times it seemed as if the very next moment something never seen but long yearned for must happen, as if a veil must drop from everything. But then it passed, and nothing happened, and the riddle was not solved, nor was the secret spell lifted, and finally one became old ... and perhaps one still knew nothing, would still be waiting and listening. ~ Hermann Hesse

Milcas raced out his door, anxious to find the answer to this riddle and discover the source of hope for a Roegan in Fargranther; the propellant of an unheard of, forgotten, impossible, and by all accounts, damned idea. ~ Evan Meekins

We both know... that soon everything is going to end...

...
This chat will be in the past... but what to do on that riddle or puzzle or mystery...???? ~ Deyth Banger

As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so ~ Freeman Dyson

And through a Riddle, at the last--
Sagacity, must go-- ~ Emily Dickinson

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring me the answers also, in due time. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out yonder there was this huge world ... which stands before us like a great eternal riddle. ~ Albert Einstein

Thinking, he walked ever more slowly and asked himself, What is it now that you were hoping to learn from doctrines and teachers, and what is it that they - who taught you so much - were unable to teach you? And, he decided, It was the Self whose meaning and nature I wished to learn. It was the Self I wished to escape from, wished to overcome. But I was unable to overcome it, I could only trick it, could only run away from it and hide. Truly, not a single thing in all the world has so occupied my thoughts as this Self of mine, this riddle: that I am alive and that I am One, am different and separate from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And there is not a thing in the world about which I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha! ~ Hermann Hesse

It was long before I got at the maxim, that in reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer; you must see with his light, if you want to know how much he saw. ~ Augustus De Morgan

I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. ~ Washington Irving

Richard was a riddle with no answer, and I was tired of playing a game I couldn't win. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years. ~ Andy Serkis

circle back, you're nearly through.
The next one, then just one more clue.
Summer's coming, dark and drear,
Soon those tourists will appear.

In the word hoard you will find
Books with numbers on the spines.
A 2 a 9 a 2 again-
Not too easy for Athena's friend. ~ Megan Frazer Blakemore

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside? ~ Alice Hoffman

Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles. ~ Aleister Crowley

While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet
whom Plato banned from his Republic
may rise up to save us all. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona's theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. ~ Robin McKinley

What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind? ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. ~ Herman Melville

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Alive without breath, As cold as death; Never thirsty, ever drinking, All in mail never clinking. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Yes, it's a lie, but the media repeated it, and a lie repeated becomes perception, and perception is reality. Perception is also very hard to change. ~ A.G. Riddle

Now here is a riddle," Melisandre said. "A clever fool and a foolish wise man. ~ George R R Martin

IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. ~ Gyorgy Lukacs

Anyone who discovers he or she has been systematically cheated on wants to know why and for how long and with whom. It's normal. Betrayal is a riddle we want to solve. ~ Sascha Arango

A riddle wrapped up in an enigma, wrapped up in a giant pain in the ass. Well done, Kami. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

The Harry Potter franchise has featured two noteworthy magical books, the diary of Tom Riddle and later Tom's Potions textbook. Of ~ Jason Mankey

He has to play my game!" Sevro says. "Shithead isn't getting out till he plays nice. I'll give him a riddle instead. What do I have in my pocket? ~ Pierce Brown