Quotes from Paul Hoffman

Get on your feet or die.

Arbell)The ungrateful gorgeous bitch.

Do you have any idea how mad you sound?' 'Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.' (...) 'And?' 'Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension how like a cow. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? To me the quintessence of dust.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it as it is to its victims—the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.

Many are called, few are chosen.

Even for the very clever it can be like breaking bones to stand back from something that's been in front of you all your life.

Until two days ago what had driven him was the will to survive: deep, animal, full of rage—but always part of him had not cared at all whether he lived or died. Now he did care, and very deeply, and so for the first time in a long time he was afraid. To love life is, of course, a wonderful thing, but not on this day of all days.

The wicked have weakness other than their willingness to kill and maim. Even the bleakest, cruelest soul can have its tender spots. Even the harshest desert has its pools, its shady trees and gentle streams.

I have a message for your daughter," said Cale. "I am bound to her with cables that not even God can break. One day, if there is a soft breeze on her cheek, it may be my breath; one night, if the cool wind plays with her hair, it may be my shadow passing by." And with this terrible threat he faced forward and the procession started once more. In less than a minute they were gone. In her shady room Arbell Swan-Neck stood white and cold as alabaster.

We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.

Again she did not seem to hear, still looking into Cale's eyes. Then slowly, hopelessly, she dropped her gaze. "I understand," she said. It was that, of course, that pierced him as if she had stabbed him through the heart. To him it was the sound of lost faith and it was unendurable. He felt he'd become a kind of god in her eyes, and it was simply impossible to give up her adoration.

Even the bleakest, cruelest soul can have its tender spots. Even the harshest desert has its pools, its shady trees and gentle streams.

Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.

You're the right colour for the Angel of Death, Mister Cale. But a little short.' 'I could cut your head off and stand on it. Then I'd be taller.

t was once famously said that it is as well that wars are so ruinously expensive, else we would never stop fighting them. However well said, it seems also to be endlessly forgotten that, while there may be just wars and unjust wars, there are never any cheap wars.

It's pointless to blame someone for being themselves and looking to their own interests.

Think of how strange the colours and sights of the world would be for a blind man abruptly made to see or a man deaf from birth hearing the playing of a hundred flutes

Mathematician need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.

Sometimes, war being the unjust and drastic creature it is, those in whom he invested hopes took an arrow in the chest, the useless, by chance, thrived to irritate him another day.

That's how the world is, and there is nothing an insignificant nobody like you, or even a significant somebody like me, can do about it.

The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life.

In such a beast as this..." (he means the army)"...it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of bravery or even strength, and once it was down it was finished as a battle.

Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.

Ser sociable es muy arriesgado, incluso fatal, porque supone estar en contacto con personas, la mayor parte de las cuales son aburridas, perversas o ignorantes, y sólo lo buscan a uno porque no soportan su propia compañía. La mayor parte se aburren a sí mismos y reciben a los demás no como a verdaderos amigos, sino como una distracción...