Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“Is is difficult to be angry with a gentleman who pays you compliments, even impertinent compliments. Especially impertinent compliments. ”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Hippopotamus Pool

“I have learned that particularly clever ideas do not always stand up under close scrutiny.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Hippopotamus Pool

“If all else fails, we will simply have to drug our attendants, overpower the guards, raise the oppressed peasants to arms, and take over the government.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Last Camel Died at Noon

“The trouble with unknown enemies is that they are so difficult to identify.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Hippopotamus Pool

“Humor is an excellent method of keeping a tight rein on unproductive displays of emotion.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Hippopotamus Pool

“You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

“What a lovely thing a rose is!"

He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.

"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Naval Treaty - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“I have always looked upon a telephone as an official kind of machine which you prepared for with fasting and prayer, and only had recourse to when strictly necessary for important business.”
― C.N. Williamson

“If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

“Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged!”
― Fay Weldon

“And a bird overhead sang Follow,
And a bird to the right sang Here;
And the arch of the leaves was hollow,
And the meaning of May was clear.”
― Algernon Charles Swinburne

“I have been very, very happy. Mamma always said that even if there wasn't any happiness one must try to be happy without it.”
― Angela Thirkell, Love Among the Ruins

“In the course of three years he had learnt enough to be able to do nearly all the work of the man immediately above him, and to make the man immediately below him do almost all the work that he was supposed to do himself. This system is known as 'efficient co-ordination,' and carried to its logical conclusion implies that the head of the firm does no work at all, and that the junior office boy is ultimately responsible for everything.”
― Denis Mackail, Greenery Street

“What are we going to do, Dogger?'
It seemed a reasonable question. After all he had been through, surely Dogger knew something of hopeless situations.
'We shall wait upon tomorrow,' he said.
'But--what if tomorrow is worse than today?'
'Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.'
'And so forth?' I asked.
'And so forth,' Dogger said.”
― Alan Bradley, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

“Time is a very rum thing, as Shakespeare knew--ambling, trotting, galloping and sometimes standing still; though why he had to add "withal" to these interesting facts we cannot explain. Perhaps he could not explain either, but wrote whatever came into his head.”
― Angela Thirkell

“You don't respect me, George," said Mrs. Morland indignantly. "You never have. And I don't respect you. We are just friends."
"Well, friends the merest Keep much that I resign," said George Knox with a voice rather unlike his own.
"I know why you are talking like that, George," said Mrs Morland. "You've been reading Browning. But I am not your Lost Mistress."
There was a moment's silence from her slightly stunned audience.
"And I have never been anyone's mistress," the gifted writer continued. "Nobody ever asked me and I should have been furious if they had. Stoker would have given notice. And it would have been most awkward for my boys; especially the married ones. I mean, my boys wouldn't have taken much notice but my daughters-in-law, whom I am devoted to, would think it not a good thing.”
― Angela Thirkell

“There is genuine joy in being alone in the dark inside your own head with no outside distractions, where you can scramble from ledge to rocky ledge, hallooing happily in a vast, echoing cave; climbing hand over hand from ledge to ledge of facts and memories, picking up old gems and new: examining, comparing, putting them down again and reaching for the next.”
― Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

“I think my mother's talents deserve a little acknowledgement. I said so to her, as a matter of fact, and she replied in these memorable words: "My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness

“So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one's own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

“It was time for tea as it so often was.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

“Graham’s thoughts of me were not entirely those of a frozen indifference, after all. I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the skylights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually, by long and equal kindness, he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written ‘Lucy’s Room.â€� I kept a place for him too â€� a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand â€� yet, released from that hold and constriction, I knew not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“Well, in a way she might be right. It might be better if he were married...It all came back to the fact that he was sure nobody would ever understand him as well as he understood himself.”
― L. M. Montgomery

“It does seem to me that some one might write stories that should be lively, natural and helpful tales in which the English should be good, the morals pure, and the characters such as we can love in spite of the faults that all may have.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins

“I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead.â€� “A true Janian reply!  Good angels be my guard!  She comes from the other world—from the abode of people who are dead; and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming!  If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf!—but I’d as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis fatuus light in a marsh.  Truant! truant!â€� he added, when he had paused an instant.  “Absent from me a whole month, and forgetting me quite, I’ll be sworn!â€� I knew there would be pleasure in meeting my master again, even though broken by the fear that he was so soon to cease to be my master, and by the knowledge that I was nothing to him: but there was ever in Mr. Rochester (so at least I thought) such a wealth of the power of communicating happiness, that to taste but of the crumbs he scattered to stray and stranger birds like me, was to feast genially.  His last words were balm: they seemed to imply that it imported something to him whether I forgot him or not. ”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“And now, sitting in the van with Charlie, who was looking ahead of them and not really paying much attention to where they currently were, she reflected on the possibility that young men were a completely alien breed, and that however much you tried to get them to see things the way you saw them, you were destined to fail. And that perhaps part of the secret of leading a life in which you would not always be worrying about things, or complaining about them, was to accept that there were people who just saw things differently from you and always would. Once you understood that, then you could accept the people themselves as they were and not try to change them. What was even more important, perhaps, was that you could love those people who looked at things so differently, because you realised that they were not trying to make life hard for you by being what they were, but were simply doing their best. Then, when you started to love them, love would do the work that it always did and it would begin to transform them and then they would end up seeing things in the same way that you did. She”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Precious and Grace

“Actual physical repose isn’t often the best cure for weariness: it’s change of thought and occupation, particularly if the open air is a part of the cure. I’ve forgotten I have a care in the world.”
― Grace S. Richmond

“Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch