Explore Book Quotes

“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”

“He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop.”

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

“The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know the truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.”

The pieces were placed in a fire under the copper, and they quickly blazed up brightly, while the tree sighed so deeply that each sigh was like a pistol-shot. Then the children, who were at play, came and seated themselves in front of the fire, and looked at it and cried, “Pop, pop.” But at each “pop,” which was a deep sigh, the tree was thinking of a summer day in the forest; and of Christmas evening, and of “Humpty Dumpty,” the only story it had ever heard or knew how to relate, till at last it was consumed.

“I love bright red drinks, don’t you? They taste twice as good as any other color.”

“It’s harder to burn down a house than you think,” Luke said.

“When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer.”

“I used to be in a very revolutionary mood, but now I think that we’ll gain nothing by violence.”

“I can only say that after living so long with the birds and animals, the movement of a human is like the difference between the explosion of a cap pistol and a cannon”