Slight Quotes

1. "I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English."
Author: Alfred Nobel

2. "Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below."
Author: Anita Shreve

3. "I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present."
Author: Augusten Burroughs

4. "The idea of someone who can play with their emotions, who can 'mystically' get them to do certain things, makes them uncomfortable. What they do not realize-and what you must realize-is that manipulating others is something that all people do. In fact, manipulation is at the core of our social interaction." He settled back, raising his dueling cane and gesturing with it slightly as he spoke. "Think about it. What is a man doing when he seeks the affection of a young lady? Why, he is trying to manipulate her to regard him favorably. What happens when two old friends sit down for a drink? They tell stories, trying to impress each other. Life as a human being is about posturing and influence. This isn't a bad thing-in fact, we depend upon it. These interactions teach us how to respond to others." -Breeze"
Author: Brandon Sanderson

5. "I had to make a change. It was no slight on my staff either. We'd all been at Boro for seven years. But certain players had got too familiar with the set-up. I had to turn it round. Terry was the one man I could think of to do it. So I went for him."
Author: Bryan Robson

6. "I didn't like anybody in that school. I think they knew that. I think that's why they disliked me. I didn't like the way they walked or looked or talked, but I didn't like my mother or father either. I still had the feeling of being surrounded by white empty space. There was always a slight nausea in my stomach."
Author: Charles Bukowski

7. "Wow, top five percent of your class at Northwestern. Nice!" Joel said and then looked over at me. "Bet you're glad to have someone so amazing working under you, huh?"Chloe coughed slightly, bringing her napkin up from her lap to cover her mouth. I smiled as I quickly glanced over to her and then back to Joel. "Yes, its absolutely amazing having Miss Mills under me. She always gets the job done."
Author: Christina Lauren

8. "You know I want you?""Yes." Though it sounded breathless, she was proud to be able to utter even a single word."I usually get what I want."A slight smile tickled at her lips. "Do I have a say in the matter?"
Author: Christy Reece

9. "I had a slight touch of Tourette's, which means you talk to yourself and bark and cry out at night."
Author: Dan Aykroyd

10. "By this time, half the people in High Norland were gathered in Royal Square to stare at the castle. They all watched with disbelief as the castle rose slightly into the air and glided toward the road that led southward. It was hardly more than an alley, really. "It'll never fit!" people said. But the castle somehow squeezed itself narrow enough to drift away along it and out of sight. The citizens of High Norland gave it a cheer as it went."
Author: Diana Wynne Jones

11. "I spent my time trying to understand grand jury procedure - a topic about which I never before had the slightest interest."
Author: Donella Meadows

12. "Sailors tended to collect things on their travels. His bosun kept a small box stuffed with plant seeds from foreign ports, a whole future garden in potentia; his carpenter kept a bag of heathen votives and shrunken heads. Curiosities, both natural and artificial, were difficult for wandering seamen to resist. One of the hands on Sparhawk's first snow had found a giant clamshell on Fiji and brought it aboard. When his shipmates quizzed him on what he planned to do with it, he said he hadn't the slightest idea—but he knew that he should regret leaving it behind."
Author: Donna Thorland

13. "Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!""The what?" said Richard."The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ...""Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity.""Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." ... "You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see."
Author: Douglas Adams

14. "Very nice lady served us drinks in hotel and was followed in by a cat. We all crooned at it. Alan [Rickman] to cat (very low and meaning it): 'Fuck off.' The nice lady didn't turn a hair. The cat looked slightly embarrassed but stayed."
Author: Emma Thompson

15. "Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport."
Author: Frances Mayes

16. "In the case of composite colour, an infinity of systems must be obtained for maxima infinitely slight and with an infinity of interval values separating them - that is to say, the whole thickness of the sensitive layer is occupied in continuous manner by these maxima."
Author: Gabriel Lippmann

17. "Their looks and personalities were still intact, but some thing had atrophied ever so slightly. Their faces bore the distinct wear of goals gone too long unfulfilled."
Author: Galt Niederhoffer

18. "Shifting the frame only slightly, the choice of a theory from among the range of always ideologically founded theories is itself necessarily ideologically motivated. Positioning is unavoidable; positioning is the result of choice from among a range of possibilities; that choice is socially meaningful - it is ideological."
Author: Gunther Kress

19. "To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

20. "Let me say no more. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish...It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like foolery."
Author: Hermann Hesse

21. "As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours' manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuketo these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just's cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker."
Author: Hilary Mantel

22. "Well?" Ron said finally, looking up at Harry. "How was it?"Harry considered it for a moment. "Wet," he said truthfully.Ron made a noise that might have indicated jubilation or disgust, it was hard to tell."Because she was crying," Harry continued heavily."Oh," said Ron, his smile faded slightly. "Are you that bad at kissing?""Dunno," said Harry, who hadn't considered this, and immediately felt rather worried. "Maybe I am."
Author: J.K. Rowling

23. "A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face."
Author: James Joyce

24. "Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronounced slightly differently, Bela's name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time, a portion of the day. Shakal bela meant morning; bikel bela, afternoon. Ratrir bela was night. Bela's yesterday was a receptacle for anything her mind stored. Any experience or impression that had come before. Her memory was brief, its contents limited. Lacking chronology, randomly rearranged."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

25. "Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don't think in terms of comic dialogue."
Author: Jim Parsons

26. "Working in a restaurant means being part of a family, albeit usually a slightly dysfunctional one. Nothing is accomplished independently."
Author: Joe Bastianich

27. "They found Seth Hubbard in the general area where he had promised to be, though not exactly in the condition expected. He was at the end of a rope, six feet off the ground and twisting slightly in the wind."
Author: John Grisham

28. "I profess accurately to describe native Africa - Africa in those places where it has not received the slightest impulse, whether for good or evil, from European civilisation."
Author: John Hanning Speke

29. "...first the strangers came with argument and authority and gunpowder to back up both. And in the four hundred years Kino's people had learned only one defense - a slight slitting of the eyes and a slight tightening of the lips and a retirement. Nothing could break down this wall, and they could remain whole within the wall."
Author: John Steinbeck

30. "Welcome to Lorelei's." A saleslady glided up to us. She had white foundation pancaked skin, and went heavy on the eyeliner and red lipstick. She wore a corset that barely contained...I'm gonna say it...her swelling bosom. If she had to sneeze, I was covering my eyes because even a slight cough could pop one of those suckers free."
Author: Kim Harrington

31. "It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped."
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

32. "The scene was not a happy one yet we looked upon it in the cold stoical spirit of a soldier; a slight chilling pang and then a return soul and body to the enemy before us."
Author: Knute Nelson

33. "It will never belong in a Hallmark card, but I drove a car into a house and killed a man for you. You chained me up for days and I still wanted to come back and talk over our darkly sordid, slightly kinky, and a lot warped relationship. Face it, you're stuck with me."
Author: Kylie Scott

34. "It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead."
Author: Larry Ellison

35. "We want books that are written for those of us who doubt everything, who cry over the least little thing, who are startled by the slightest noise."
Author: Laurence Cossé

36. "Do you know what a balance wheel is?" She shook her head slightly. "There's one in every clock or watch. It rotates back and forth without stopping. It's what makes the ticking sound...what makes the hands move forward to mark the minutes. Without it, the watch wouldn't work. You're my balance wheel, Poppy." -Harry Rutledge"
Author: Lisa Kleypas

37. "My incomparable beloved, Seven months you have been gone, and I fear you will never return. I await your brief, infrequent letters like a boy, desperate for any small indication that you remember I exist, hoping for evidence that you tire of that foreign land where you now live. I read your missives a hundred times for the slightest intimation that you will be coming home. The part of my mind that does nothing but wait grows daily, and soon nothing will be left to attend to life's duties. One word, my love, just one; that is all I seek. One word to let me know that you will not stay away forever, and that I will at least have your presence and friendship in my life, even if I can never have your passion and your love."--Julian Hampton to Penelope, Countess of Glasbury"
Author: Madeline Hunter

38. "Toreth?" Warrick asked softly.He kept still, breathing slightly irregularly, until finally Warrick climbed into bed beside him. Then it was simply a question of timing the movement right so that they met in the middle, accidentally, and Warrick's arm slipped accidentally round him.Why, he wondered sleepily, did he still bother pretending?"
Author: Manna Francis

39. "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
Author: Mark Twain

40. "See, Cameron. The only things I care about in this life are me, you, Mum, Dad, Steve and Sarah. And maybe Miffy. The rest of the world means nothing to me. The rest of the world can rot.'Am I like that too?'You? No way.' There's a slight gap in his words. 'And that's your problem. You care about everything.'He's right.I do."
Author: Markus Zusak

41. "Sin's cold, calculating, and dangerous. She scares the shit outta me. I wouldn't want to meet her in a dark alley and that's the truth. Compared to her, you're a damned Sun angel.""You just don't know her," Cass said in a soft voice, her mouth curving the slightest bit. "She's really very sweet.""Sure," Nick scoffed. "Sweet as sugar. Let's get back to why you won't let me put my hands on you."
Author: Michelle O'Leary

42. "Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time."
Author: Nigel Kennedy

43. "Goodreads' policy of not listing the book a quote comes from (and even better, also the page it appears in) is certainly unreasonable, for it harms its traceability and verifiability, and thus increases the risk of a proliferation of absurd made-up quotes. Users, therewore, would do well - until Goodreads revises their quoting criteria - in including the source their quotes come from in this box, even if this is slightly aesthetically unpleasant."
Author: Oscar Wilde

44. "Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering."
Author: Rachel Kushner

45. "The dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. they will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can't understand them, they frown and move away.The dead aren't scary. They're just sad."
Author: Rick Riordan

46. "Espinoza experienced something similar, though slightly different in two respects. First, the need to be near Liz Norton struck some time before he got back to his apartment in Madrid. By the time he was on the plane he'd realized that she was the perfect woman, the one he'd always hoped to find, and he began to suffer. Second, among the ideal images of Norton that passed at supersonic speed through his head as the plane flew toward Spain at four hundred miles an hour, there were more sex scenes than Pelletier had imagined. Not many more, but more. (16)"
Author: Roberto Bolaño

47. "There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.The hopers would feel slighted if they knew."
Author: Rumi

48. "Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it."
Author: Seamus Heaney

49. "Ruric clung to me and shouted, "Your father." Looking down below I saw my father running after us, several alarmed guards trailing him. As I watched, the High Lord's slight demon shape began to shimmer in a remarkable transformation that stretched him out and out and up into a huge and long, black serpentine dragon. It was a glorious sight, one I'd never thought to see. He launched himself gracefully into the air amidst shouted protests from his guards, a large dragon smile on his face that showed more free and delighted emotion than I'd ever seen on his face. ..."His poor guards. An eight-member team set out at a dead run after us. They must be having a hissy fit over my father taking off like that, alone, unguarded. Although I couldn't imagine what could possibly be of threat to a four-ton, fire-breathing dragon."
Author: Sunny

50. "The world tilted slightly sideways. 'I think I need to sit down.' The floor seemed like the best option. It was close and he'd already proved that he could hit it. His legs folded."
Author: Tanya Huff

Slight Quotes Pictures