“I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head...”
―
Laurie R. King
“I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915.” ― Laurie R. King
“Eccentricty had flowered into madness.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“That's what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.” ― Laurie R. King
“You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“Men do, I've found, accept the most errant nonsense from a well dressed woman” ― Laurie R. King, Justice Hall
“The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets call the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one mightn't do.” ― Laurie R. King
“Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind.” ― Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem
“He said nothing. Very sarcastically.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“Margery," I blurted out in a passion of frustration. "I don't know what to make of you!"Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes."I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk as it believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way." She smiled a sad, sad smile. "You mustn't be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold-never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need warmth, Mary-you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won't consume you; I won't capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don't let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia."Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to folllow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery's vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.” ― Laurie R. King, A Monstrous Regiment of Women
“Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“My God, it can recognise another human being when it's hit over the head with one.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I would have stolen it for you, had I known you were interested." His voice was muffled by the door to the lumber room down the hallway, and I heard thumps and a crash.I raised my voice a trifle more than mere volume required. "I'm interested because she was. Both of them, come to that--Damian's art is infused with mystic symbols and traditions."Holmes' voice answered two inches away from my ear, making me jerk and spray a handful of maps across the floor. "Religion can be a dangerous thing, it is true," he remarked darkly, and went out again.” ― Laurie R. King, The Language of Bees
“Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses.But there's nothing like a book.” ― Laurie R. King
“I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915.” ― Laurie R. King
“Eccentricty had flowered into madness.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“That's what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.” ― Laurie R. King
“You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“Men do, I've found, accept the most errant nonsense from a well dressed woman” ― Laurie R. King, Justice Hall
“The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets call the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one mightn't do.” ― Laurie R. King
“Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind.” ― Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem
“He said nothing. Very sarcastically.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“Margery," I blurted out in a passion of frustration. "I don't know what to make of you!"Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes."I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk as it believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way." She smiled a sad, sad smile. "You mustn't be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold-never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need warmth, Mary-you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won't consume you; I won't capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don't let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia."Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to folllow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery's vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.” ― Laurie R. King, A Monstrous Regiment of Women
“Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“My God, it can recognise another human being when it's hit over the head with one.” ― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
“I would have stolen it for you, had I known you were interested." His voice was muffled by the door to the lumber room down the hallway, and I heard thumps and a crash.I raised my voice a trifle more than mere volume required. "I'm interested because she was. Both of them, come to that--Damian's art is infused with mystic symbols and traditions."Holmes' voice answered two inches away from my ear, making me jerk and spray a handful of maps across the floor. "Religion can be a dangerous thing, it is true," he remarked darkly, and went out again.” ― Laurie R. King, The Language of Bees
“Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses.But there's nothing like a book.” ― Laurie R. King
