„A falling-down wreck on the edge of town, curtains permanently drawn, that would turn out to have been home to some ancient recluse who'd been surviving on ramen and toenail clippings since time immemorial, though no one realizes it until a property appraiser or an overly ambitious census taker barges in to find the poor soul returning to dust in a La-Z-Boy. People get too old to care for a place, their family writes them off for one reason or another—it's sad, but it happens.“

— Ransom Riggs, book Miss Peregrine's Home of Peculiar Children

Source: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Chapter 3, Page 79

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Jan. 17, 2022.

Ransom Riggs13

American writer 1979

Related quotes

„It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, out on the edge of the prairie…“

— Garrison Keillor American radio host and writer 1942

A Prairie Home Companion, News from Lake Wobegon

Home

„Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen — the census taker — and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million."“

— O. Henry, book The Four Million

Preface
The Four Million (1906)

People

„His eyes, as she had noted before, betrayed a keen intelligence but no emotion whatsoever—they might have been the eyes of some ancient tortoise, one who had seen a thousand empires rise and fall and cared nothing for any of them.“

— David D. Levine science fiction writer 1961

Source: Arabella and the Battle of Venus (2017), Chapter 17, “Conspiracy” (p. 276)

Intelligence

„I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.“

— Jodi Picoult, book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

World, Dreams

„I think you ought to let me take poor Tessa into town to get some new clothes. Otherwise, the first time she takes a deep breath, that dress will fall right off her."
Will looked interested. "I think she should try that out now and see what happens.“

— Cassandra Clare, book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Thinking, Time, Clothes

„Not that he regretted having killed the guy in Stockton. The one who'd been ready to shoot him over the five crumpled dollar bills in his jeans pocket. He was quite happy to have sent that particular home boy to hell.“

— L.J. Smith American author 1965

Source: Dark Visions

Guy, Home, Boy, Hell

„The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know it's happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you "sir."“

— Robert McCammon, book Boy's Life

It just happens.
Introduction.
Boy's Life (1991)

Love, Life, People, Truth

„I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.“

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Poet, essayist, physician 1809 - 1894

Source: The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872), Ch. 1, p. 1 The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=Rx9EAAAAYAAJ (1892)

School, Boy, Light, Time

„I have been a Member of Parliament for 18 years. I have been a member of the Government for 14 years, of the Cabinet for ten years and Prime Minister since 1990. When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do. I shall, therefore, advise my parliamentary colleagues that it would be appropriate for them to consider the selection of a new leader of the Conservative Party to lead the party through Opposition through the years that lie immediately ahead.“

— John Major Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1943

"Major's Speech", The Times, 3 May 1997, p. 2.
Statement in Downing Street on 2 May 1997 following the general election in which the Conservative Party was heavily defeated. Major was just about to resign as Prime Minister and announced his decision to stand down as party leader simultaneously.
1990s, 1997

Lie, Time

„I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.“

— Flannery O’Connor American novelist, short story writer 1925 - 1964

People

„I write in a hurry, because the little one, who has been sleeping a long time, begins to call for me. Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment.“

— Mary Wollstonecraft British writer and philosopher 1759 - 1797

Letter to Gilbert Imlay (19 August 1794)

Sadness, Peace, Sleep, Strong

„[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.“

— Michael Chabon, book Gentlemen of the Road

Afterword
Gentlemen of the Road (2007)

Family, Law, Home, Support

„Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.“

— Robert Frost American poet 1874 - 1963

1920s, A Peck of Gold (1926)

Children, Sea

„Days, up and down they come
Like rain on a congadrum
Forget most, remember some
But don't turn none away
Everything is not enough
And nothin' is too much to bear
Where you been is good and gone
All you keep is the getting there
To live is to fly
Low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes“

— Townes Van Zandt singer-songwriter 1944 - 1997

To Live Is to Fly

Sleep, Forgetting, Flying

„The ages roll
Forward; and forward with them draw my soul
Into Time’s infinite sea.
And to be glad or sad I care no more;
But to have done and to have been before
I cease to do and be!“

— Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton English statesman and poet 1831 - 1891

The Wanderer, Book iv, Stanza 9, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Age, Sadness, Soul, Time

„The room fell quiet. And as I read down the list of over one hundred and fifty eight-grade boys, I realized that to me, there had only ever been one boy.“

— Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped

Source: Flipped

Boy, Reading

„About the hides I will ask you. Those that are killed on the block. That ought to go to the poor people and the old women. The Great Father [US Government] when we went down there said he would agree to take all our hides at $3 apiece, but we don’t get that and I wish you would fix that again. I would rather get $4 for my hides. There are a good many poor people and old women that have no one to look out for them, and they ought to get those hides.“

— Hollow Horn Bear 19th century Lakota chief and policeman 1850 - 1913

During negotiations with Crook and others, in [Books on Google Play Congressional Serial Set, 1890, U.S. Government Printing Office, https://books.google.com/books?id=lQ0ZAAAAYAAJ, 1 March 2018, 64]

Women, People

„Consider yourself having been reasonably humiliated in front of ten million people. Now, without saying another word, turn around, and find the exit. Goodbye.“

— Judith Sheindlin American lawyer, judge, television personality, and author 1942

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLQ3fw-7_hA&feature=bf_next&list=UUNOaQAKNIBe0AHquR9ttP0g&lf=plcp
Quotes from Judge Judy cases, Dismissing a statement or case

People

„“Whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.“

— David Reich (geneticist) American geneticist, Professor of Genetics 1974

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html, NY Times, 23 March, 2018

People, Time

„But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.“

— Carl Eckart American physicist 1902 - 1973

Source: Our Modern Idol: Mathematical Science (1984), p. 3.

Wisdom, Truth, Hope, Error

Ransom Riggs13

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