#phrase

I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#paraphrased #self-expression #death

Six months ago when she first came up with the idea to kill Wilson, back when she was living in Memphis, she'd started going to church again. Since she was spending so much time thinking about sinister things, the least she could do, she reasoned, was to think about God and his love twice a week at church so that she wouldn't become a total sociopath. And rather than kill other people who were stand-ins for the person she really wanted to kill, like serial killers did, she'd be kind and generous to others and hone in on the one who deserved to die. And her plan had worked extremely well. Since she'd started planning to kill Wilson, and then decided to destroy his family instead, she felt no animosity toward anyone but him. Almost none at all! ↗

— Elizabeth Stuckey-French

#madness-and-mayhem #revenge #turn-of-phrase #family

[L]et us talk about the unholy vice of self-esteem, the beginning and completion of the passions; and let us talk briefly, for to undertake an exhaustive discussion would be to act like someone who inquires into the weight of the winds. ↗

— Saint John Climacus

#good-phrase #religion-is-wrong #religion

You could know a man not by what his friends said about him, but by how he treated his servants. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#paranormal #paraphrased #young-teen #teen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. ↗

— Seth Grahame-Smith

#zombies #brain

I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am. ↗

— Arthur Rimbaud

#hell #paraphrased #perception #perception

It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#paraphrased #simile #simile

[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#quotations #similes #well-worn-phrases #wisdom #simile

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. ↗

— Mikhail Bakunin

#absolute #admire #condition #existed #god

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#dead #end #handsome #i #know