J. L. B. Smith Quotes

When you're locked up in here for life, you learn to welcome the little freedoms.

Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness.

In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

It is a fool of a shepherd who culls his dogs.

The Night World isn't a place. It's all around us. The creatures of Night World are beautiful and deadly and irresitable to humans. Your best friend could be one-so could your crush.

I may be heaven-sent, but I'm not perfect.

There had to be dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background it's flashing glory.

You don't have friends in here, you'll soon come to understand that. You get attached to someone, then you'll just lose them. They'll get shanked or they'll jump or they'll be taken one night.

Thinking of death--strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off--made me feel happier than ever.

Knackered inmates are easier to control than pumped-up ones. And dead inmates are even easier to control, if you follow me.

If I lie down on my bed I must be here, But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.

Love is not love that wounded bleeds And bleeding sullies slow. Come death within my hands and I Unto my love will go.

My heart was full of softening showers, I used to swing like this for hours, I did not care for war or death, I was glad to draw my breath.

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.

Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)

Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is.

Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.

You can't believe everything people tell you - not even if those people are your own brain.

My God - it's a green child!" said the American. "What is this place - the House of Usher?

We all know that it is women who take the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.

What you're missing is that the path itself changes you.

Rose doesn’t like the flat country, but I always did – flat country seems to give the sky such a chance.

Finally someone takes me seriously enough to ask for my word of honor, and it’s a villain.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

I wonder if there isn't a catch about having plenty of money? Does it eventually take the pleasure out of things?

I could marry the Devil himself if he had some money.

Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.

Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?

I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk.

The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.

Prayer's a very tricky business.

Trust but check. Check on those we trust.

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

Respect is a kind of magic too, you know.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

So I suggest you stick close, pay attention, and avoid breaking the Terrorverse's only commandment: Thou shall not be stupid.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

Ignorance is the world's most curable affliction.

But difficult situations and wrong choices conspire to trap us in hopelessness.

Jealousy knows no logic, nor does it respect reciprocity.