Quotes by Michelle Franklin

There comes a point in ones life where the people whom we grew up admiring begin to die, leaving a great chasm in the world. This is awful enough to deal with without having anything so annoying as feelings getting in the way of personal equanimity. And then, possibly even more horribly, there comes a time in ones life when the people whom we grew up with or the people who are in our same age group begin to die. I have had the disagreeable business of having to watch colleagues only a few years my senior perish without warning, though premonition would not soften the blow. I am now realizing that I am entering this time, the dreadful gateway of existence, the one that leads to watching the ebb and flow of time, the great rote and sussuration of life and death, and being able to do nothing but welter in misery and pine over the dregs of hideous mortality. Death is an unaccountable business, one that robs the living of the peace we believe to be --perhaps mistakenly-- our birthright, one which asks the living to pay for the departed in the currency of feelings, leaving us to wallow in emotional debt. There is a loneliness about behind left behind as is there a thrill of horror for what lies beyond. The sum total of living is to sacrifice peace in favour of finding it, which makes little sense at all. I often wonder if the dead know we grieve for them, as the penury of pity only disconcerts ourselves. It is poor comfort, the business of mourning, for what is there really to mourn about excepting our own desire for reconciliation, something which no one, not even the dead, can furnish?

The captain’s eyes betrayed what his countenance must conceal: the anguish of an ancient being who must honour his birthright by living beyond those whom he would have given much to keep.

I am never one to judge others; I am so eccentric myself that I have no right to cast aspersions. A person may or may not like a thing, and I have little to say other than I love it too or how could you dare not like it please die promptly, but I leave everyone to find their own niches in time. We are all avid about certain things; I happen to rave over many subjects, all of which have a place in the Kingdom of Nerdonia, and whenever I hear someone unjustly disparage a thing I consider sacred, I lay it down that the person is either mistaken or a dunderwhelp, the latter being the likeliest of the two. There is a great difference between knowledge accompanied by bias and ignorance accompanied by gallantry, and while all tastes may be what they are, there are bare necessities that will immediately define a character and relationship, these things usually being how many Monty Python lines one knows and whether or not they know what Iocaine is.The strength of lasting friendships rests on whether one can sing the theme to Neverending Story.

If the sale of flesh could be made as easily as the sale of spiritual exemption, the prescience of a dedicated businessman might be well preserved.

What will I do when youre gone? said Alasdair, with a faltering voice.Bryeison placed a hand on his shoulder and said, with raging tranquility, Do what is good and what is right.

The past is behind us, said Boudicca,but the difficulty there is we keep looking over our shoulders.

But the world hinges on good fathers and those who would be the merchants of confidence.

Abuse really is its own alphabet. Those who have not gone through it cannot understand it fully. The echos of violence hang in subconscious long after the threat is gone.

It is 32c today, and the only thing keeping me from hanging myself is the small sense of relief I glean from attaching my body to the vents of my delicious cooling piece. It is a stunning unit, exquisite in all its forms, exceptional in its application, and effective in all its functions. I would marry it, if only I knew it would not die on me sometime within the next five years. Appliances, like obedient children or silent extroverts, cannot last forever, and while my unbidden affection kept my other air conditioner alive for the better part of ten years, not all inanimate objects can be fueled by my love.

Never underestimate the audacity of the small minded and slightly crapulous.A rather bleezed young neighbour decided to have a grammar battle with me. It lasted all of two seconds.I said something slightly amicable, and he responded with, “You sure thats how you use that word?”I put down my laundry basket and turned to him slowly and deliberately.“Do you really want to have this discussion with me, son, or do you want to go home and rethink your life?”He grumbled and vanished.

A scientist does not have hope, sir. Hope is what a man has in the absence of answers, and once he does empirical experimentation, he replaces hope with knowledge and disappointment.

The most obnoxious thing in the world is to listen to others drone on about how much they love the heat.I leaned over to one woman at the café, who was professing how at home she was in the sweltering rot of hell, and said, “If you enjoy the heat so much, marry it, honeymoon with it, and throw it off a cliff, to spare the rest of us the agony of having to listen to the joy of your wretched matrimony.”She laughed.I was completely serious.

A six mile meteorite cannot compare with a culinary cataclysm of this magnitude.

The words ‘when I take you home’ echoed in the captain’s mind, caroming off that private place where all his suspicions and uncertainties slept.

I know we are supposed to welcome anyone who vows to protect the kingdom, but really, anyone will do anything for a copper these days, and where pride and promises are saleable, expendable men come very cheap indeed.

The matron glanced at the old man and suppressed a smile. “He is absolutely miserable.” “I enjoy miserable. It gives one a contrast to all the delectabilities of life. But is he housebroken, inpala? He is rather rumpled. He will look well on my ship, but will he wash well? Do professors fray as a general rule? I will not have my ship looking ragged.”“They do tend to fade after a few years of hard use.

The cern paled, and all the courageous which accompanied him into the conversation was now all done away. He shrunk back, his audacity dwizzening under the teneberous gloom of the giant’s long shadow. He turned to entreat the help of his fellow soldiers with desperate looks, but there was little more than half of the regiments left behind him, all of them unwilling to intervene, and his bowels rumbled, his heart sinking into the grave of conscience, and never had he felt more mistaken in his conduct.

There is a very great difference between older and old, the former being desirable and the latter being inevitable.

We all emerge into this material soup, mix about with the meat and potatoes of life, and then slip away, back to the primordial germination whence we came. Nascence is a strange business: we forget what we were doing only to come forth and continually forget what we were doing perpetually over the course of a lifetime, until it is time to quit this plane through some unseen and ethereal vomitorium, and presumably forget that we had forgotten all over again.

A heart? Peppone knows where one is to be met with. There is always someone in the black market in need of dying early.