N Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with N. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora had to accept that- as she now knew only too well- some truths were just impossible to see”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora ignored him. 'Do you reckon they're ghosts? Guiding spirits? Guardian angels? What are they?'
It felt so ludicrous, in the heart of a scientific facility, to be talking like this.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora knows better than most that nothing lasts forever. Life doesn't, love doesn't, hope doesn't, so why would death, hate, or despair? Nothing is permanent. Not even the end of the world.”
Source: The New Hunger
“Nora leaves her husband, not-as the stupid critic would have it-because she is tired of her responsibilities or feels the need of woman's rights, but because she has come to know that for eight years she had lived with a stranger and borne him children. Can there be anything more humiliating, more degrading than a life-long proximity between two strangers? No need for the woman to know anything of the man, save his income. As to the knowledge of the woman-what is there to know except that she has a pleasing appearance?”
Source: Marriage and Love
“Nora let out a deep exhale. 'Dan wasn't like that.'
'People change,' said Mrs. Elm, still looking at the chessboard. Her hand lingered over a bishop.
Nora re-thought. 'Or maybe he was like that and I just didn't see it.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora listened to this as she stared at the bubbles rising in her mineral water.
'I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,' she said, realising something for the first time. 'But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths. In one life, I might be married. In another, I might be working in a shop. I might have said yes to this cute guy who aske me out for a coffee. In another I might be researching glaciers in the Arctic Circle. In another, I might be an Olympic swimming champion. Who knows? Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora nearly hung up the phone. Maybe she should have. But she didn't. Now she knew it was a possibility, she needed to hear his voice again.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora noticed something was happening to her face. She was — could she be? — smiling. And naturally, not just because someone expected her to.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn't recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am.”
Source: Alternate Side
“Nora remembered the night Ash knocked on her door. Maybe lifting a dead cat off the road and carrying it in the rain around to her flat's tiny back garden and the burying it on her behalf because she was sobbing drunkenly with grief wasn't the most archetypally romantic thing in the world. But it certainly qualified as kind, to take forty minutes out of your run and help someone in need while only accepting a glass of water in return.
She hadn't really been able to appreciate that kindness at the time. Her grief and despair had been too strong. But now she thought about it, it had really been quite remarkable.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora Roberts is cool.”
“Nora's father, it was true, had been a difficult man. As well as being highly critical of everything Nora did, and everything Nora believed, unless it was related to swimming, Nora had also felt that simply to be in his presence was to commit some kind of invisible crime.”
“Nora's smile was still there but she felt tears behind her eyes. This seemed a good life. A family of her own. A daughter to go on camping holidays with.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora said: 'I love you, Nicky, because you smell nice and know such fascinating people.”
Source: Novels
“Nora scanned the room, absorbing every new piece of information. Every cuddly toy and book and plug socket, as if they were all part of the jigsaw of her life.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora shook her head quickly, like a dog shaking off water. She didn't want to be confronted with that long interminable list of mistakes and wrong turns again. She was depressed enough. And besides, she knew her regrets. Regrets don't leave. They weren't mosquito bites. They itch for ever.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora sighed. She still had no idea what she wanted.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora stared at the books around her. 'So, are you saying I only have pawns to play with?'
'I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory. You have to keep going. Like that day in the river. Do you remember?”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora thought about being consoled by Mrs. Elm when her dad died. Staying with her, comforting her. It was probably the most kindness anyone had ever shown her.”
“Nora thought of how good it had felt, swimming in the pool. How vital and alive. And then something happened inside her. A strange feeling. A pull in her stomach. A physical shift. A change in her. The idea of death suddenly troubled her. At the same time the lights stopped flickering overhead and shone brightly.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora tried to act as if every sentence he said wasn't an animal running into the road.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora tried to get her head around this. 'So, how do I return to the library? If I'm stuck in a life even worse than the one I've just left?'
'It can be subtle, but as soon as disappointment is felt in full, you'll come back here. Sometimes the feeling creeps up, other times it comes all at once. If it never arrives, you'll stay put, and you will be happy there, by definition. It couldn't be simpler. So: pick something you would have done differently, and I will find you the book. That is to say, the life.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora tried to reply but couldn't get the words out. She nodded instead.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora walked through the haze of dust and smoke in the direction Mrs. Elm had pointed towards, as the ceiling continued to fall.
It was hard to breathe, and to see, but she had just about managed to keep count of the aisles. Sparks from the lights fell onto her head.
The dust stuck in her throat, nearly causing her to vomit. But even in the powdery fog she could see that most of the books were now ablaze. In fact, none of the shelves of books seemed intact, and the heat felt like a force. Some of the earliest shelves and books to set on fire were now nothing but ash.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora was comforted to know she had no inclination whatsoever to see what Dan was doing with his life. Instead, she felt very grateful to be with Ash. Or rather, and more precisely: she imagined she was grateful, because he was lovely, and there were so many moments of joy and laughter and love.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora was in free fall and she had no one to talk to.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora was sitting up in bed, surrounded by lace pillows, sipping tea. Hugh perched on the edge of the bed and said: "You were wonderful last night."
r school based
"I showed them all," she said, looking pleased with herself. "I danced with the Prince of Wales."
"He couldn't stop looking at your bosom," Hugh said. He reached over and caressed her breasts through the silk of her high-buttoned nightdress.
content areas
She pushed his hand aside irritably. "Hugh! Not now."
He felt hurt. "Why not now?"
"It's the second time this week."
"When we were first married we used to do it constantly."
"Exactly when we were first married. A girl doesn't expect to have to do it every day forever."
Hugh frowned. He would have been perfectly happy to do it every day forever-wasn't that what marriage was all about? But he did not know what was normal. Perhaps he was overactive. "How often do you think we should do it, then?" he said uncertainly.
She looked pleased to have been asked, as if she had been waiting for an opportunity to clear this up. "Not more than once a week," she said firmly.
"Really?" His feeling of exultation went away and he suddenly felt very cast down. A week seemed an awfully long time. He stroked her thigh through the sheets. "Perhaps a little more than that."
"No!" she said, moving her leg.
Hugh was upset. Once upon a time she had seemed enthusiastic about lovemaking. It had been something they enjoyed together. How had it become a chore she performed for his benefit? Had she never really liked it, but just pretended?
There was something dreadfully depressing about that idea.”
Source: A Dangerous Fortune
“Nora wasn't asking him to make her over into someone else; all she wanted was to borrow a few books. Was he such an effete intellectual as to think that an exposure to literature could work some kind of marvelous transformation in her? And what if it could? What if she awoke beside him one morning, having devoured Pride and Prejudice the night before, and was miraculously transfigured into an erudite, civilized woman? Would he still even want her at all?”
Source: White Palace
“Nora watched Joanne bite into one of the cakes and wondered how good any plan could be if it didn't involve eating something so clearly delicious as a Brazilian honey cake.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora. We can't do everything.”
“Nora:"We could have a secret signal to fund each other in the forest! Ren, can you imatate a sloth?"
Ren:"Nora?"
Nora:"Yeah?"
"I don't think sloths make a lot of noise.”
“Nora wondered how her writing on his skin with a Sharpie could be a highlight of his existence.
'You saved my life. "Beautiful Sky" saved my life. That song. It's so powerful.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“Nora, your self-pity monitor is beeping, it's telling me you're feeling sorry for yourself over something trivial and need to get a life.”
“Nora: "How do you feel?" Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.”
“Nora: I have questions. Patch: I should have known you've only been keeping me around for answers. Nora: Well, that and your kisses. Anyone ever tell you you're an incredible kisser?”
“Nora: This is crazy. Patch: I'm crazy. About you.”
“Nora: What are you planning? Patch: I wouldn't call this planning. I'd call this throwing a Hail Mary with seconds left on the clock.”
“Norah herself was labelled for all to see. She was labelled 'Middle class, no money.' Hardly enough to keep herself in clean linen. And yet, scrupulously, fiercly clean, but with all the daintiness and prettiness perforce cut out. Everything about her betrayed the woman who has been brought up to certain tastes, then left without the money to gratify them; trained to certain opinions which forbid her even the relief of rebellion against her lot; yet holding desperately to both her tastes and opinions.”
Source: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
“Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people – where? she could not remember this either – who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.”
“Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.”
Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel
“Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.”
“Norbit operates on the principle that vulgarity is automatically funny. Crassness doesn't need a joke attached because it is (in and of itself) the height of hilarity.”
“Norcia is an ancient town with Roman ruins and Renaissance structures that exists like a flat island in a sea of more mountainous towns. It has survived countless strong earthquakes, including two particularly devastating ones a few years back. You can still see some buildings across town in disrepair and chunks of structures missing.
But in the intervening years, as the town has rebuilt, it has also taken on a magical air of rebirth. Old buildings mixed in with new patches. The enthusiasm of seeing tourists streaming through again is palpable. You can still see the remnants, but it's clear that even natural devastation can't remove its charm. Parts of the restaurant's back wall have crumbled, but it now has an air of bohemian clutter where plants have taken root in the fractures.”
Source: Recipe for Second Chances
“Nord annonciateur de beau temps
Est le réveil
Sud le repas
Ouest le repos”
“Nordenson describes wrestling with work as with a large force that wants to have its way with you, even as you want to have your way with it. This wrestling, sinewy and particular as its wrestler, enlarges us as we read our way into her life with its incisive insights and explorations. Can one wrestle meditatively? This author has learned the art and we are the benefactors.”
“Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”
“Nordie's at Noon is an honest and inspiring testament to [these authors'] experiences which, I am completely confident... will inspire thousands of women as it inspired me.”
“Nordstrom believes that great service begins with showing courtesy to everyone-customers, employees, and vendors.”
Source: The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence: The Handbook For Becoming the