Quotessence
Home / Quotes / H Quotes

H Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with H. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All H Quotes

“He had been through a hundred heartbreaks, but he found himself afraid when he thought of Alexander Lightwood breaking his heart. He did not know how this boy with the messy black hair and the worried blue eyes, with his steady hands and rare sweet smile that was less rare in Magnus's presence, had acquired such power over him.”

“He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working rhymes and songs.”

“He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for.”

“He had broken a union ruling which was a basic law. In his opinion it was a foolish ruling, but nonetheless . . . vengeance is mine, sayeth the Extraterrestrial Repairmen’s Union, Martian Branch. Wow, how he hated the bastards; his hatred had warped his life and he recognized that—and he did nothing about it: he wanted it to warp him. He wanted to keep on hating them, the vast monolithic structure, wherever it existed. They had caught him for giving socialized repair.”

“He had brought his bone saw in its leather case. And his white linen smock, the one he used to save his clothes when he had dirty work in store, and would have Li Chang wash and bleach after. An amputation would be the dirtiest work there was. He remembered the smocks the surgeons wore, layer on layer of red, dried blood darker under fresh red splashes, with the occasional white splinter of bone. Joshua prayed as he rode, prayed hard and desperately, prayed that the smock in his bag would be clean and white when he turned homeward.”

“He had by now divested himself of schoolboy attitudes. He was unburdened by the desire to be a martyr or a hero. Any thoughts in that direction, Belgica effectively had quashed. Heroism in the corrupt sense of the age almost by definition, meant wanton self-sacrifice and bungling. For neither had he any taste. He wanted rational attainment; victory, but not at any price. No point upon the globe was worth the cost of a single life.”

“He had called girls to him before. There was nothing so easy whether you were walking into a classroom, a club, or down the street. All you had to do was send out the right signals, give her the right look, turn your body the right way, and never for a moment let it cross your mind that she might not be interested.”

“He had chosen her, she was his wife, she would do. The discovery he made was that the sensation of owning a wife, and a house, and a staff of servants, was a pleasurable one; that to order and be obeyed in his own home, to know he was master here as well as in his cafés, to entertain guests and be aware of their covetous glances at his goods, and his woman, was a thrill of keen intensity new and extremely satisfying.”

“He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you - they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better - about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn't know what to say.”

“He had come to see that people were blind to tragedy till they experienced it firsthand, and that they were willing to risk the unknown if it meant they could make money in the interim. This was the case not just with small Indian markets, with their reluctance to secure themselves, but with the U.S. as well: Airlines had known for years about the danger of hijackings, but had lobbied against security because it cost time and money to process passengers. Better to let a plane be occasionally hurled off track, the heads of the airlines reasoned, than to hemorrhage money in the terminals.”

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”

“He had complicated our task of being pleasant dinner companions by mentioning famine, something that Americans had never known. The word could only conjure otherworldly landscapes of the skeletal dead, which was not the spectral image we wanted to present, for what one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.”

“He had crossed the room with no notion what he might say or do - he had no knowledge of the language of condolence, no skill at social small talk; his metier was business and politics. And yet, when his hostess had introduced them and left, he found himself still holding the hand he had kissed, looking into soft brown eyes that drowned his soul. And without further thought or hesitation had said, 'God help me, I am in love with you.”