A Peculiar Peril Quotes

There was a peculiar fascination for Dorothea in this division of property intended for herself, and always regarded by her as excessive. She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others - likely to tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her; yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would have been perilous with fear.

You’re going to have to get much smarter very quickly.

The British are a peculiar race. My grandfather was transported to Malaya because they needed tin, and yet I’ve never once met a Briton to whom the thought had occurred that perhaps I spoke English because I am from one of their colonies. It is as if I were a piece of chess in a game played by people who never look down at their fingers.

precision in gardens was too much like turning a wolf on the prowl into a pug with an embroidered ruffle for a collar. She much preferred the wolf.

But this—this is always the same task over and over, to explore cryptozoology of a crude sort. All that changes is the type of animal, and the only challenge is whether the jaws on a crocodile can reasonably be expected to fit onto a bear. For example.

It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her as she herself had immediately appeared.

As for chaos,” Mamoud said, “chaos is not what is happening around you, but how you conduct yourself around … chaos.” The earth erupted in explosion and flames not forty feet from the turret. Mamoud didn’t flinch, but Jonathan definitely did. Even Lady Insult put her spyglass down. The tower shuddered from the footfall of the elephants. There was a sour smell like sulfur.

By nature and by training this woman was all for conservation of life. She had been brought up in rather a strict and narrow school. In her day although no one, certainly no woman, was expected to save humanity, every female was confidently expected to produce it. More than that, she was earnestly enjoined to guard and protect it. So Mary Ball and her successor Mary Washington, early imbibed not only a sense of the woman's responsibility for the family but a sense of her authority over it....At any rate, in this particular crisi she was merely obeying a law of nature as old as womanhood--to protect the creature she had brought into the world. There was no subtlety in her. She could not see the finer shadings of ths situation, the fact that in holding him back from the frontier she might be putting him into even greater peril. Her course was prompted by instinct and impulse, and she never thought of questioning the right or wrong of it. So, armed with the most primitive of all weapons, she faced her son for a hard fight. But she was pitted here against a temendous paradox. With her whole might she was resisting the demands of war, and yet it had been that very strength that had produced the warrior. Her opponent was remarkably like her--in strength of mind and body, in resolution, in force of will. Now, it is one of the ironies of life that sameness creates opposition. In the conflict that day at Mount Vernon, therefore, the contestants were fighting with identical weapons, even though from different spheres... George Washington must have been a very patient man. And if he had patience, that, too, came from her by that same theory of heredity that makes a firstborn son peculiarly like his mother. So this must be written in to her credity when for the third time she has to be recorded as trying to interrupt his destiny. As a last resort he used a weapon that she herself had put into his hand. Madam," he is said to have remarked with respectful finality, "the God to whom you commended me when first I went to war will be my protector stil.

Oh, now you need me, you bollocky clumsy bat. You horrifying blood-recycling fiend.

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic,1 beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.

Time took on a peculiarly viscous quality.

Okayyy," I said, exaggerating my disappointment in order to hide it. While seeing Emma in her underwear was an undeniably appealing prospect, all the life-threatening peril we'd endured lately had put that part of my teenage brain into a kind of deep freeze. A few more serious kisses, though, and my baser instincts might start to reassert themselves.

Baldwin was not naïve about the human capacity for evil, especially among white folk. He knew intimately what it meant to be vulnerable to the whims of others who held a certain kind of power over you. “If you’re a Negro, you’re in the center of that peculiar affliction,” he said, “because anybody can touch you—when the sun goes down. You know, you’re the target of everybody’s fantasies.” Instead, what shocked him was the fact that white America killed someone who espoused love, an apostle of nonviolence. King’s death revealed the depths of their debasement and the scope of our peril. Baldwin

A voice came to him as if from a dark, empty well lined with moss. A voice saying his name, telling him to answer a question.

Jonathan shuddered. There were birds in his head now, as if escaping from the empty feeders above their heads. Ghost birds. Fluttering around inside his skull, and he could not get them out. Yet still he went on, wanting to burst through the nettle and tall trees, find a copse and feel the sunlight on his face. It was getting colder and colder in the haunted mansion.

Jessica wasn’t the kind of woman who backed down from a challenge, though.

Being a police officer was an inherently risky job.

Birds weren’t supposed to levitate or have four mouths or twenty pairs of wings or twelve sets of legs and undulate like a dragon. But, what could you do?

[...] Magical creatures are not to be handled. We have our defenses, each peculiar to the species or, in some cases, to the individual creature. Touch us at your peril." He glanced at her. "You weren't thinking of trying, were you?

I have come to have a great affection for monsters...

There came another explosion, and Jonathan flinched, but Mamoud moved not at all, and somehow his calm steadied Jonathan. He had the demeanor of a doctor or a civil servant, in a useful way.

Chapter Thirteen GARBAGE IN THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY (HOLD THE GOAT)

In other words, we mess with Nature at our peril.