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1 " From the mouths of the innocents flows truth. "
― Rae Carson , The Girl of Fire and Thorns (Fire and Thorns, #1)
2 " The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. "
― , The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike, #1)
3 " When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl. "
― Ernest Hemingway , Death in the Afternoon
4 " OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABESIt is a pity that we often succeed in our endeavors to deceive each other. ~Empress Irene~ "
― Kris Waldherr , Doomed Queens
5 " American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtighteningand chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale’s bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold. "
― Eric Jay Dolin , Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
6 " We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes. "
― H. Rider Haggard , She: A History of Adventure (She, #1)
7 " Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man staggers forth, his cane tapping lightlyown the aisle. He leans against the door,raises a violin to chin, and says I’m sorry to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen. And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like musicshould be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover, inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo seeps through our skin like warm water, we who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching. Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roseson the instrument. His head swooning to each chord exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me has put down her book, closed her eyes, the babyhas stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws will always open to swallow a smile already lost.How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.how will hear these notes when the train slides into the yard, the lights turned out, and the songlingers with breaths rising from empty seats? I know I am too human to praise what is fading. But for now, I just want to listen as the train fillscompletely with warm water, and we are all swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart flowing from his hands. I want nothingbut to put my fingers inside his mouth, let that prayer hum through my veins. I want crawl into the hole in his violin.I want to sleep there until my flesh becomes music. "
― Ocean Vuong
8 " WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can’t see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble. "
― Lawrence Hill
9 " In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk...I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up.Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief.It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers.To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret!And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!...Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long?The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it! "
― Jean Lorrain , Monsieur De Phocas
10 " You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman... I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion/ Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage...Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood? "
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton
11 " My heart's scripture tastes foreign in the mouths of cowards and on the tongues of those who have never breathed inthe moon and breathed out the world. "
―
12 " Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still life, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again. "
― Thomas Wolfe , Look Homeward, Angel
13 " Of course you're sorry. The first words out of the mouths of men who are caught doing something they're only too happy to continue until they're caught. "
― Julie Anne Long , What I Did for a Duke (Pennyroyal Green, #5)
14 " Save your skin from the corrosive acids from the mouths of toxic people. Someone who just helped you to speak evil about another person can later help another person to speak evil about you. "
― Israelmore Ayivor
15 " I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time. "
― Saul Bellow , Herzog
16 " In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear. "
― Daniel Todd Gilbert , Stumbling on Happiness
17 " But why bother? Why exert all this effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old?First, your willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child. If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him- or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them.Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them.Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say. The dictum that great wisdom comes from " the mouths of babes" is recognized as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listens to children. Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.Fourth, the more you know about your child, the more you will be able to teach. Know little about your children, and usually you will be teaching things that either they are not ready to learn or they already know and perhaps understand better than you.Finally, the more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem. And the more appropriate your teaching, based on your knowledge of them, the more eager your children will be to learn from you. And the more they learn, the more extraordinary they will become. If the reader senses the cyclical character of this process, he or she is quite correct and is appreciating the truth of the reciprocity of love. Instead of a vicious downward cycle, it is a creative upward cycle of evolution and growth. Value creates value. Love begets love. Parents and child together spin forward faster and faster in the pas de deux of love. "
18 " Belize: Hell or heaven? [Roy indicates " Heaven" through a glance]Belize: Like San Francisco.Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.Roy Cohn: Isaiah.Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.Roy Cohn: And a dragon atop a golden horde.Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.Roy Cohn: And Heaven?Belize: That was Heaven, Roy. "
19 " In Transylvania it was memories of the Romanian revolt that stalked the Hungarian aristocratic imagination.. In Galicia it was memories of Tarnow that performed a similar service for the surviving Polish noble families. Both societies shared something of the brittle, sports-obsessed cheerfulness of the British in India - or indeed of Southerners in the pre-1861 United States. These were societies which could resort to any level of violence in support of racial supremacy. Indeed, an interesting global history could be written about the ferocity of a period which seems, very superficially, to be so 'civilized'. Southern white responses to Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in 1831, with Turner himself flayed, beheaded and quartered, can be linked to the British blowing rebel Indians to pieces from the mouths of cannons in 1857. "
― Simon Winder , Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe
20 " Gentleman,” I purr smoothly in greeting.Ezra and Cort circle me like sharks scenting blood. I know who they are, but not who is who since they’re wearing black hoods over their heads. It covers them to the shoulder and has holes for the eyes and mouth. Their clothing is identical Italian designer label suits. Even their shoes are the same. Their eyes glow like steel ball-bearings from the safety of their masks. The mouths are different- one serious, one snarky- both ruby-red and kissable.While they circle Fate and me several times taking our measure, the other Master stands in a sphere of his own confidence. He’s older and I don’t mean just in age, but knowledge. Ezra and Cortez feel like babies compared to this man. I bet he’s who I really have to impress.I wait, always meeting their eyes when their path moves them back to my face. I don’t follow them with my gaze- I wait.“Hello,” the hood with the serious lips speaks in a smooth deep tone. I know it’s not his true voice, but the one Kris calls The Boss. His eyes are kind and assessing.No one pays Fate any mind as she cowers at my thigh. I hold their undivided attention. Curly-locks is quiet- watchful- a predator sighting its quarry. Snarky mouth is leering at my chest and I smirk. Caught ya, Cortez Abernathy.“I seem to be at a disadvantage conversing with you while you’re hooded. I can’t see you, but you can see me.” I try to get them to out themselves. It’s a longshot.“And who are you, Ma’am?” Ezra asks respectfully.“Please call me Queen.” I draw on all of my lessons from Hillbrook to pull me through this conversation. The power in the air is stifling. I wonder if it’s difficult for them to be in the same room without having a cage match for dominance. I feel like I’m on Animal Planet and the lions are circling.“Queen, indeed,” Cort says snidely under his breath and I wince. I turn my face from them in embarrassment.I should have gone with something less- less everything. I know I’m strong, but the word also emulates elegance and beauty. I’m neither. Have to say, tonight has sucked for my self-esteem. First, the dominant one overlooks me for Fate and now Cortez makes fun of me- lovely.“What did you say to upset her?” Ezra accuses Cortez.“Nothing,” Cort complains in confusion.“Please excuse my partner. Words are his profession and it seems they have failed him this evening. I will apologize for not sharing our names, but this gentleman is Dexter.” He gestures to the dominant man. I wait for him to shake my hand like a civilized person. He does not- he actually crosses his arms over his chest in disobedience. This shit is going to be a piece of cake. "
― Erica Chilson , Queened (Mistress & Master of Restraint, #6)