Quotes from Dorothy Gilman

What I felt at this moment was black dispair - but no, this was wrong because the color black has vitality , the night is black and has stars and a moon, and mysterious and important events can happen in the darkness. Despair, I decided, was grey: endless, bottomless, without night or day, time, sun or stars.

to every life there eventually came a moment when one had to accept the fact that the shape, the pattern, the direction of the future was entirely out of one's hands, to be decided unalterably by chance, by fate or by God.

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves: this was the moment to learn who I was and what I'd become...

quoting Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat: "Good friends beware! the only life we knows Flies from us like an arrow from the bow, the Caravan of life is moving by, Quick! to your places in the passing show.

from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat: "Set not thy heart on any good or gain, Life means but pleasure, or means but pain; when Time lets slip a little perfect hour, O take it - for it will not come again.

But terrorists—" He shook his head. "They're the parasites of the century. They want to make a statement, they simply toss a bomb or round up innocent people to hold hostage, or kill without compunction, remorse or compassion.

She looked at Farrell because there was nothing else to look at.

But we must find somewhere appropriate to leave Henry." He groaned. "You look so extremely respectable, you know." "I have a flexible mind—I believe it's one of the advantages of growing old," she explained. "I find youth quite rigid at times. Why not a cemetery?" Colin

It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality.

rather nice person, and that I just picked a lemon.

He added pointedly

Mrs. Pollifax wondered why, when she was being her most serious, people found her so amusing.

evil is, after all, only a deficiency of goodness.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.

The best things arrive on time.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel - nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

We overlook how much in our lives is invisible; love, for instance; thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light.

It's compassion that makes gods of us.

will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later.

A man from hell is not afraid of hot ashes.

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves.

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.