strangely QUOTES

21 " I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. (" The Haunted Spinney" ) "

22 " She had almost felt relieved when she was arrested. The thing she had dreaded, feared, run from had happened. When it came, she was strangely liberated from the fear. She couldn't dread what had already come to pass. She didn't have to anticipate the horror when the horror was right there. With her arrest came a certain calm, a quiet comfort. It had come. She had known it would and she could stop fighting. "

― Amy Harmon , From Sand and Ash

23 " Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper. So I write and wait. I am committed to no cause, I love no living person. The fact that I have no future except what you can count in hours doesn't seem to disturb me unduly. After all, the future whether here or there is equally unknown. So for the waiting days I have only the past to play about with. I can juggle with a series of possibly inaccurate memories, my own interpretation, for what is worth, of events. There is no place for speculation or hope, or even dreams. Strangely enough I think I like it like that. "

24 " And then, a strangely comforting thought trickled through me—I had nothing, so I could do anything now. Anything I wanted. I had nothing left to lose. "

― , Numbers (Numbers, #1)

25 " He opened his mouth, but stopped as he beheld her smile. Though she had no regrets about her choice, she felt something strangely like disappointment when he said, " As you wish. "

26 " My point is that I am going to figure this out, like I always do. First, we’re going to find a way to get into Artemisia. We’re going to find Cress and rescue Cinder and Wolf. We’re going to overthrow Levana, and by the stars above, we are going to make Cinder a queen so she can pay us a lot of money from her royal coffers and we can all retire very rich and very alive, got it?" Winter started to clap. " Brilliant speech. Such gumption and bravado." " And yet strangely lacking in any sort of actual strategy," said Scarlet." Oh, good, I'm glad you noticed that too," said Iko. " I was worried my processor might be glitching. "

27 " I have been seeing dragons again.
Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,
one held a body like a badly held cocktail;
his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz,
sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.

They are not richly bright
but muted like dawns
or the vague sheen on a fly's wing.
Their old flesh drags in folds
as they drop into grey pools,
strain behind a tree.

Finally the others saw one today, trapped,
tangled in our badminton net.
The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased face
while his throat, strangely fierce, stretched
to release an extinct burning inside:
pathetic loud whispers as four of us
and the excited spaniel surrounded him. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The Dainty Monsters

28 " I am strangely excited to see how snarky and sarcastic all us bookworms are going to become when we’re old. We’ll all be Mother Ogma’s with tattoos and piercings and purple WoW leggings carrying wands and staffs, and best of all everyone’s hair will finally be able to hold colour because we’ll all have white hair! We’ll all be blogging on WordPress and still waiting for Sherlock and still celebrating Christmas with Doctor Who specials while our grandchildren play quidditch… "

29 " I’m strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity—taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages. "

― , Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

30 " I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. "

31 " And what the music elicits—in me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it—is a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It’s the same for all truly great dark art. There’s a pleasure in seeing our shadows paraded beautifully. It’s liberating to find them so prettily decked out, a sort of reverse Halloween. "

32 " You can't rush art." I crumpled another lost attempt and tossed it behind me. " Besides, patience is a virtue." " It's a virtue until it's a waste of time," he pointed out.The cello unleashed a few notes that sounded strangely bright for such an instrument, and Hal nodded in its direction. " See; even a musical instrument agrees with me. "

33 " I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles. "

― Arthur Conan Doyle , The Complete Sherlock Holmes

34 " We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is. "

― Alan Jacobs , The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

35 " Well, we never expected this!" they all say. " No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!" How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am. "

36 " This is Roshana, the last queen of the Amulen Empire, back when my people ruled all the lands from the east to the west. She is something of a legend among us. Every queen aspires to learn from her mistakes.”
“Her mistakes? Surely you mean her victories.”
“What?”
I frown at her. “Roshana was one of the greatest queens in the world. She ended the Mountain Wars, she routed Sanhezriyah the Mad, she—”
“For a foreign serving girl, you are strangely well versed in Amulen history.”
“I spent a lot of time in libraries as a girl.”
“Were you there to dust the scrolls or read them?”
“Surely Roshana’s victories outweigh her errors.”
“The higher you rise, the farther you fall. For all her wisdom, Roshana was fooled by the jinni, believing it was her friend, and then it destroyed her. Ever since that day, my people have hunted the jinn. There is no creature more vicious and untrustworthy.”
“This is not the story I heard,” I say softly. “My people tell it differently. That the jinni truly was a friend to Roshana but was forced to turn against her. That she had no choice.”
“Surely I know how my own ancestress died,” returns the princess, a bit hotly. “Anyway, it was a long time ago, but we Amulens do not forget. "

― Jessica Khoury , The Forbidden Wish

37 " The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

38 " For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.

But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. "

― Alain de Botton , The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

39 " If not towards his case to give him glimpses of what could be a happy future, it stayed back at least to warrant her happiness, stayed back with the pain that strangely didn’t hurt anymore. "

― Faraaz Kazi , Truly, Madly, Deeply

40 " You have something else of mine, Miss Wakefield,” he amended. “I believe you meant to borrow it and return it directly, but you never did return . . . my heart. It’s been in your possession since our first meeting.”She drew in a staggered breath, daring to hope.“Though without a heart, one might wonder how I came to be here, standing before you right now,” he went on, making her heard spin again. “Do you wonder, Miss Wakefield?”When she nodded, he grinned and placed her hand over his chest.“There is a heart in here, but it is not mine. You see, I believe you made a dire mistake our first meeting. When you meant to return mine, instead you gave me yours. Doesn’t it beat strangely beneath my breast? "