Briefly Quotes

#1. A newspaper is an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes of his own accord, and talks to you briefly every day of the common wealth, without distracting you from your private affairs.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#2. I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before.

Kent Haruf

#3. Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours?
He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. "That," he exclaimed, "is precisely what's wrong with academics.

Claire North

#4. And I love you too." His fingers skate the edge of my jaw, dance briefly
over my lips. "You should know that. You have to know that.

Lauren Oliver

#5. I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

Julian Barnes

#6. Two ghosts, briefly rescued from oblivion; a small act of reclamation, a chance to make amends.
-Paul Murray, SKIPPY DIES

Paul Murray

#7. For years she had lived in a vacuum of emotions, and now emotions boiled in her: love, fear, hope, shame, self-pity, pride; each struggled for supremacy, ruling only briefly, before surrendering to a contender that was sometimes darker and sometimes lighter, but always different.

Stephen Lloyd Jones

#8. He started toward the door, then halted briefly. To the two of them he said, 'Is the owl genuine?'
Rachael glanced swiftly at the elder Rosen.
'He's leaving anyhow,' Eldon Rosen said. 'It doesn't matter; the owl is artificial. There are no owls.

Philip K. Dick

#9. The stratagems by which briefly you
ameliorated, even seemingly
untwisted what still twists within you
you loved their taste and lay there
on your side
nursing like a puppy.

Frank Bidart

#10. Phryne opened her book and sipped her lemonade. Agatha Christie. What a plotter. Phryne wished briefly that the real world was so amenable to being solved. ***

Kerry Greenwood

#11. All her hopes of a future have been torn away from her again
and having those hopes, even briefly, makes this far more painful than not having had them at all.

Neal Shusterman

#12. Summoning those memories was like touching a burning pot. She could do it only briefly before she had to pull away.

Stephanie Perkins

#13. This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.
I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Probably," I say. "But then, what isn't?

Dan Simmons

#14. No one hit home runs the way Babe did. They were something special. They were like homing pigeons. The ball would leave the bat, pause briefly, suddenly gain its bearings, then take off for the stands.

Lefty Gomez

#15. He asked what she was in for and complimented the find workmanship of her metal extremities, but she ignored him, making him briefly question if he'd been separated from the female population for so long that he could be losing his charm.
But that seemed unlikely.

Marissa Meyer

#16. Stonetooth took his place. "I give you a life for duty," he meowed. "Remember what you owe to your Clan as well as what your Clan owes to you." He touched noses with Brokentail, who flexed his claws briefly and then was still.

Erin Hunter

#17. There are five language-sets in particular which they employed for this purpose. Briefly, they are as follows: Wisdom, Torah, Spirit, Word and Shekinah

N. T. Wright

#18. All that was left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn't have to yell- it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly- what it had to say.

Gerard Way

#19. When we had the 'flash crash' in 2010, where the price of some stocks briefly fell to zero, high-frequency trading played a big role in that event.

Brad Katsuyama

#20. Briefly, Scarlett let herself imagine what it would be like to go to Legend's private isle, to play the game and win the wish. Freedom. Choices. Wonder. Magic.

Stephanie Garber

#21. At the same time, we both pulled back briefly still oh so close. Everything in the word rested on that moment.
"We can't ... " He told me.
"I know," I agreed.
Then his mouth was on mine again, and this time I knew there would be no turning back.

Richelle Mead

#22. Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa's sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.

Tom Brokaw

#23. You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation.

Eckhart Tolle

#24. I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't fix the weather - you just have to get on with it.

Douglas Adams

#25. It is love's soft breath on life's dark coals that briefly reds the fire.

John Holland

#26. Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

Edgar Allan Poe

#27. He wondered briefly what it was like to dream. He never did. Possibly because he so seldom slept. He was obsessed with obtaining all the wealth he could, burning the midnight oil as often as possible. It protected a person from having to do things he didn't want to do.

Lorraine Heath

#28. When George Bush finally leaves the White House, the satire industry will briefly join the rest of the economy in recession. It will certainly be the end of an era.

Rory Bremner

#29. I looked briefly up from my notes. I was surrounded by hearts, sectioned and preserved. Hearts with holes. Hearts with leaking valves or thickened walls. Hearts with narrow or transposed aortas. I closed my eyes.

Claire Holden Rothman

#30. The pictures do not ask you to help these people, but something much more difficult; to be briefly, intensely aware of their existence, an existence as real and significant as your own.

Danny Lyon

#31. She paused briefly, then took a sip. "Mistress Vin is being modest, Master Hammond," Sazed

Brandon Sanderson

#32. Breathe like a fallen leaf and think of nothing. Just breathe and let your heart and mind be carried, however briefly, by the spirit you can't quite see.

Mark Nepo

#33. Historians, only things of weight,
Results of persons, or affairs of State,
Briefly, with truth and clearness should relate;
Laconic shortness memory feeds.

James R. Heath

#34. This mountain, the arched back of the earth risen before us, it made me feel humble, like a beggar, just lucky to be here at all, even briefly.

Bridget Asher

#35. Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.

Denis Johnson

#36. As a Christian, I try to meditate or pray at least once a day, however briefly.

Jay Parini

#37. There was never a cataclysmic moment in which things might have been, however briefly, etched in relief against memory, against things to come - a moment which, by its sheer magnitude, defined her history and her future. Instead, Kathryn thinks, she has disintegrated slowly over a number of years.

Christina Baker Kline

#38. Fine, I'll touch you, briefly, but only because you sound like you need the praise that your body's hot, and I'm totally selfless like that.

Kyle Adams

#39. I don't understand it, sir. What's the point of trying to fix a world were in so briefly? Where's the meaning in all that work if it's just going to disappear? Without any warning?

Isaac Marion

#40. Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew. From west and beyond west, into the wind and through it, they came past countless moons and suns. One laughed and briefly wore a scarf of raindrops in her hair, and then with wicked feet she kicked a cloud and caused rain to swamp a boat.

Pat O'Shea

#41. Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

Gertrude Atherton

#42. Mathematics may, be briefly defined as the science of quantities, and is one of the most important of disciplining studies which engage the practical student.

Rufus Choate

#43. We are far more revealing by the questions we ask than the answers we give. Answer briefly to sense where their questions are heading.

Kare Anderson

#44. If you kill me, you will lose your soul and your son to the sky," I warned, my eyes straying briefly to his young son who met my gaze, his hands clinging to the mane of his enormous horse. "Kneel!

Amy Harmon

#45. The memory became only a briefly noted thought, analytical rather than emotional.

Maggie Stiefvater

#46. The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.

William James

#47. You are this universe experiencing itself, very briefly, as a human.

Eckhart Tolle

#48. You used to be such a swell kid," Bobby stated briefly.
"Oh! And I ain't no more?" Helen little-girl'd.

J.D. Salinger

#49. William the Conqueror's campaigns against the rebels have usually been dealt with very briefly and resistance has been summarily dismissed as ineffective, largely because in the end, that resistance was overcome in a singularly brutal manner. Even

Peter Rex

#50. Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want.
No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.

Cormac McCarthy

#51. Having tasted life without the pain of obligation perpetually burning him from within, he'd choose death over the return to bondage. He'd make that choice in an instant. Life as a slave was unspeakable; life as a slave who had briefly tasted freedom was unthinkable.

Ian Tregillis

#52. When I fuck you, Mr. Day, it will not be briefly. It will be long and hard and extremely thorough. I'm going to take pains with you.

K.J. Charles

#53. If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century ... I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#54. A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops. In the agriculture of the soul that has to do with nurturing attributes, flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation.

Neal A. Maxwell

#55. When we find a painting or a novel or a musical we love, we are briefly connected to the best that human beings are capable of, in ourselves and others, and we are reminded that our path through the world must intersect with others. Whether we like it or not, we are not alone.

Andy Miller

#56. The officers shook hands, and the sniper gave a millimetric nod, which Reacher returned, equally briefly, which for two alleged snipers was effusive, and for a dogface and a jarhead meeting for the first time was practically like rolling around on the floor in an ecstatic bear hug.

Lee Child

#57. I briefly consider keying her precious BMW, but quite frankly, I don't have the energy to go all Carrie Underwood on her ass. I still have over an hour drive ahead of me.

-Jackson 'Blame It on the Pain

Ashley Jade

#58. The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.

Christine Kenneally

#59. It was more than that, he said, looking down briefly at her. Love fades when you die. I am clearly dead, but my love for her hasn't diminished. It still burns inside me like a flicker in a flame.

Rachel M. Greenebaum

#60. the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere are expected to be showered by Siding Spring - perhaps briefly, perhaps more extensively. Shock waves may rock the atmosphere.

Anonymous

#61. The sun sets and we sleep. The sun rises and we wake. We wake and, ever so briefly, ever so blindly, we enjoy the fantasy of beginning anew. Then, without fail, reality reasserts its presence.

John Verdon

#62. I'd worked at the World Bank briefly as an undergrad and studied poverty levels around the world - particularly those earning less than $1.25 a day.

Leila Janah

#63. The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves.

Edward O. Wilson

#64. Love is a powerful thing; it makes us all equals by making us briefly, beautifully human.

Seanan McGuire

#65. Briefly speaking, our conclusion is that stochastic volatility does not make a huge difference as far as the pricing is concerned if you get the average volatility right. It makes a big difference as far as hedging is concerned.

John Hull

#66. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption.

Pankaj Mishra

#67. Oh, Abby, he briefly squeezed his eyelids shut, desperation and despair warring for supremacy inside him. Why didn't you leave when you had the chance, mi vida?

Julie Ann Walker

#68. Seriously?" she said with a glance of skepticism. Driggs and this nerdlinger? "You guys are best friends?"
Ferbus looked up briefly to give her a smug look. "We prefer the term heterosexual life mates.

Gina Damico

#69. You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#70. Housework was comforting. In cleaning and restoring a room, one could assert control. One could even pretend, briefly, that life could be tidied the same way.

Robin Hobb

#71. I want to start two institutions, one in Madras and one in Calcutta, to carry out my plan; and that plan briefly is to bring the Vedantic ideals into the everyday practical life of the saint or the sinner, of the sage or the ignoramus, of the Brahmin or the Pariah.

Swami Vivekananda

#72. Show business imposes its own strict temporality: no matter how many CDs or DVDs we own, it would still have been better to have been there, to have seen the living performers in the richness of their being and to have participated, however briefly, in the glory of their performance.

Larry McMurtry

#73. Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly.

Ben Okri

#74. Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

Graham Greene

#75. What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?

Martin Amis

#76. I am no lover of pompous title, but only desire that my name may be recorded in a line or two, which shall briefly express my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace.

Elizabeth I

#77. At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.

Arthur C. Clarke

#78. I know you once offered to fix dinner for me, but I seriously thought you were bragging."
Those lips, mmm, those sinful lips, pouted briefly, with the sole purpose of driving me crazy, no doubt. He shrugged.
"Nope, no bragging. You hungry?"
"Starving." Though not exactly for food.

Ramona Wray

#79. You realize I'm probably not going to be able to walk tomorrow," she grumbled. Nathan shook his head, but she didn't miss the spark of humor in his gaze before he lowered it briefly. "That's what you get for being difficult to a Dom with a big dick.

Trista Ann Michaels

#80. I've never lost perspective on who I am. Well, maybe briefly, but generally I'm pretty balanced.

Sting

#81. And briefly and succinctly, he put Miss Marple's theory of the crime before the doctor, ending up with her final suggestion.

Agatha Christie

#82. My credentials, briefly: I no longer go to church or believe in God, but I can still name every one of the fruits of the Spirit and reeled for days upon hearing the announcement that Audio Adrenaline was reunited with one of the singers from DC Talk.

Mallory Ortberg

#83. [L]et us talk about the unholy vice of self-esteem, the beginning and completion of the passions; and let us talk briefly, for to undertake an exhaustive discussion would be to act like someone who inquires into the weight of the winds.

John Climacus

#84. I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.

Dan Simmons

#85. In expressing briefly my views upon an important subject which has recently agitated the nation ... , I fervently hope that the question is at rest and that no sectional or ambitious or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our institutions.

Franklin Pierce

#86. Trying to read his face. It was like a book written in a foreign language she'd studied all too briefly.

Cassandra Clare

#87. I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We're not going to get rid of that; it's just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum.

Michel Faber

#88. Sheep can befriend a hungry wolf only for briefly.

Jim Butcher

#89. Before leaving, I met them briefly. Thad and Ruben were among them. Then there was Annar, Orion, Stephan (pronounced Steh-fawn),

Kristen Ashley

#90. At school I briefly wanted to be a palaeontologist, but I was no good at chemistry and physics.

Mark Gatiss

#91. Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which briefly stated means this, that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#92. Hapiness is as exclusive as a butterfly, and you must never pursue it. If you stay very still, it may come and settle on your hand. But only briefly. Savour those moments, for they will not come in your way very often.

Ruskin Bond

#93. I love Chicago. I lived there briefly for three months and kept a boat under one of those space-age buildings. It was very Jetsons.

Candace Bushnell

#94. I was very briefly under contract to Disney Animation, to develop ideas for animated features. They don't like you to use the word "cartoon" around there.

Charles Busch

#95. That's brain tissue. How can you-?" Claire shut her mouth, fast. "Never mind. I don't think I wanna know."
"Truly, I think that's best. Please take it." He showed his teeth briefly in a very unsettling grin. "I'm giving you a piece of my mind."
"I so wish you hadn't said that.

Rachel Caine

#96. The moon is more interesting than the unchanging sun. That is surely why it is used in poetry and the sun is not - unless one talks of dawn or dusk, when the sun briefly hovers on the edge of day.

Liza Dalby

#97. I was briefly bitter.

Margot Kidder

#98. I wondered briefly if cats also came back after death, then dismissed the thought because as far as I had ever been able to tell, cats do not have a purpose.

W. Bruce Cameron

#99. Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#100. Sometimes, when you briefly glance in Hollywood, there's a tendency to play it in a very "Yes, she's exhausted, and yes, she's working, and yes, she's taking care of her kids full time, and yes, she's a mom, but she's also in a great mood all
the time."

Patricia Arquette