Littell Quotes

#1. Giving children the opportunity to stir up life and leave it free to discover.

Maria Montessori

#2. So what's the most atrocious thing you've seen?" He waved his hand: "Man, of course!

Jonathan Littell

#3. In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible.

Steven Spielberg

#4. Life is short," I told her. "The challenge is to make it sweet.

Robert Littell

#5. I am an amateur mountain climber. Once or twice a year I go off to Chamonix in the French Alps, under Mont Blanc, and with a guide do treks that include rock climbing at high altitude.

Robert Littell

#6. Please, mein Herr, shoot the children cleanly.

Jonathan Littell

#7. Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.

Robert Littell

#8. Like translation itself, Asymptote is a fluid web reaching out to all sides, bringing texts and readers together, through the most improbable and marvelous of connections.

Jonathan Littell

#9. Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.

Robert Littell

#10. We need to take our cue from the drug dealers in Hoboken who, when they reach twenty, go to the local undertaker and prepay their funeral because they don't expect to live to thirty.

Robert Littell

#11. There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don't know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that's what's terrible. You

Jonathan Littell

#12. It's a mistake to possess comfortable things," he said now. "Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don't settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.

Robert Littell

#13. We'd been waltzing and eating tea cakes with a murderer.

Alyxandra Harvey

#14. The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

Robert Littell

#15. To the success of our hopeless cause

Robert Littell

#16. Cole was meticulous to a fault; office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.

Robert Littell

#17. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

Robert Littell

#18. Blood transmits a propensity for heart diseases; if it also transmits a propensity for treason, no one has ever been able to prove it.

Jonathan Littell

#19. I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

Robert Littell

#20. This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It

Jonathan Littell

#21. I've got a bit of money in the bank. I'm quite comfortable.

Paul Gascoigne

#22. I am not conventionally religious, but I am an ongoing student of the Old and the New Testament and the history of the Jewish people and the birth of Christianity.

Robert Littell

#23. The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly.

Robert Littell

#24. If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ's sake use a long spoon.

Robert Littell

#25. For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

Robert Littell

#26. Both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who's to blame? What

Jonathan Littell

#27. Keep your ears open and listen to the whispers of the universe, because they will guide you for the best.

Hina Hashmi

#28. The dry high spirits of this destroyer of optimism make most optimists look damp and depressed.

Philip Littell

#29. Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?

Robert Littell

#30. So who is guilty? Everyone, or no one? Why should the worker assigned to the gas chamber be guiltier than the worker assigned to the boilers, the garden, the vehicles? The

Jonathan Littell

#31. A policeman, as you discover, has to put up with a hell of a lot of abuse. A man in any other line of work would nail a guy who laid that kind of abuse on him. I know I would.

Kent McCord

#32. I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

Jonathan Littell

#33. If you ever managed to make me cry, my tears would sear your face.

Jonathan Littell

#34. Your first time?" the Hauptman gently asked. I nodded. "You'll get used to it," he went on, "but maybe never completely." He

Jonathan Littell

#35. When people ask me if I have worked for the C.I.A., I often answer: what good to you is my answer? Because if I did, I might not say so.

Robert Littell