Burning Bright Quotes
"Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather, When He, who all commands, Shall give, to call life’s crew together, The word to pipe all hands: Thus death, who kings and tars dispatches, In vain Tom’s life has doffed, For though his body’s under hatches, His soul has gone aloft."
"Life was hard, after all, and what made it easier than a little laughter, as well as a little business putting money in his pocket?"
"Lord, it’s hot for March," she said. "It weren’t this hot back home, were it, Jem?"
"We’re not going to see that rubbish," Anne Kellaway declared.
"What comes out first is not always best," he explained. "It needs reworking to shine."
"This world"—he gestured around him, taking in the ring, the stage, the seats, and the galleries—"becomes their world."
"Even if she had been able to read, she would have found it hard to make out his scrawl, full of words and lines scratched out and written over, verses turned upside down, sometimes written so quickly they seemed more like black marks than letters."
"Oh, he’ll be all right. By Monday night he’ll have added to his show a spectacle based on the explosion, with a backdrop of this"—Maggie gestured around her—"and fireworks going off to make it feel real."
"You got her, then?" Bet Butterfield called, pushing through the crowd to her husband’s side. "Where in hell have you been, you little minx?" she roared at her struggling daughter, and slapped her. "Don’t ever run away from us again!"
"You’re right, Maggie, I did draw him as he sat across from me. That was indeed one instance of drawing from life. Mr. Paine seemed to demand it. I suppose he’s that sort of fellow. But I don’t make a practice of it."
"For sheer professionalism as well as dazzling entertainment, no one can touch us."
"We’re all going to Hell, I expect. I’ll wager there is no Heaven."
"The tension between contraries is what makes us ourselves. Not just light, but dark. Not just at peace, but at war. Not just innocent, but experienced."
"It is a lesson we could all do well to learn, to see all the world in a flower."
"We live in London now, not Dorsetshire. We have to leave Dorset things behind."
"What you want is not worth half the value of what you’ve still got. Remember that."
"Everything engravers do gets printed opposite. The engraver has to be able to see it both ways."
"He took her to the river’s side and there he laid her legs so wide."
"You should have thought of that when you refused to sign the declaration, and in front of everyone."
"You’ll be staying here with us, Mags. You’re a London girl, you know. You belong here."
"I’m writing with a solution that will remain on the plate when the rest gets eaten away by acid."
"It was hot and still, and with the sun beating down, insects invisibly whirring and ticking, and the cow parsley floating her along, Maggie began to feel as if she were in a dream."
"You could fit a hundred o' them Piddlers in the Thames!"
"Your children remained with you, alive or dead, nearby or faraway."
"I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow."
"What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
"Once you do summat like that, you can't go back to the way it was before you did it. You lose it, and it's hard to get it back."