Ryan North > Quotes

“Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.”
― Ryan North

“To answer your question as honestly as I can, I've wanted since I was very little to not have to worry about money. I've never been poverty-level poor (I mean, there's been years where I've been officially beneath the poverty line, but that wasn't poverty: that was being a student and living the Student Lifestyle), but I've been in a place where you know you can't afford a better-quality food, where you can't do certain things because of money, and I'd prefer not to have those problems if I can. I sort of have troubles with money in general, with how it determines so much of our lives but with how we all try to ignore it, but I would like to be (and stay) in a place where I can pick up some new comics and games and not worry about how much they cost.

This is terrible; you're asking me where I want to be in the future, what I want my life to be like, and the only thing I can tell you is "Man, all I know is I don't want to be POOR.”
― Ryan North

“But giving up's easy. You know what's hard? To believe in your own worth, to know you've got something special in you even if nobody else can see it. Even when you can't.”
― Ryan North, Adventure Time, Vol. 4

“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.*”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Wait... maybe the question isn't "How do I beat him?" Maybe the question is "Dude, why are we even fighting in the first place?”
― Ryan North, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 1: Squirrel Power

“Scientists need to invent a way to make DNA work like in cartoons.”
― Ryan North

“Progress! Progress through everybody dying and their kids eventually not caring who their parents hated!”
― Ryan North

“As they say, 'It's all downhill from cupcakes.”
― Ryan North

“bikes have also been fundamental to early women’s liberation. While this will hopefully not be an issue in your civilization—you’re starting on a better foot than we ever did, seeing as you don’t have to labor under the hangover of thousands of years of patriarchy—it’s worth noting how something as simple as giving people the ability to cheaply transport themselves under their own power changed European society in the late 1800s CE. This newfound mobility not only allowed women to participate in civilization in ways they couldn’t before, but actually changed the way women saw themselves. They were no longer observers moved around by society: instead, they were active participants who could—and would—move themselves. The clothing women wore also changed in response to the bicycle, as demands for a new “rational dress” that allowed for a modicum of physical activity meant the end of the restrictive corsets, starched petticoats, and ankle-length skirts that had previously been worn.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Obeying an unjust law is itself unjust.”
― Ryan North

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. —You (also, Martin Luther King Jr.)”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Scientists are often seen as turbonerds, but the philosophical foundations of science are actually those of pure punk-rock anarchy: never respect authority, never take anyone’s word on anything, and test all the things you think you know to confirm or deny them for yourself.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“London’s dramatic and hugely expensive sewer system—still in use today—was constructed for entirely the wrong reasons and only happened to improve public health by accident.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Europeans—who generally like to think of themselves as being a pretty savvy lot—managed to forget and then rediscover this fact about vitamin C at least seven more times over the next five hundred years, including rediscoveries in 1593 CE, 1614 CE, 1707 CE, 1734 CE, 1747 CE, and 1794 CE, until the idea finally stuck in 1907.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. —You (also, Nikola Tesla)”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Maybe the best things are those that take the most work, you know? Maybe how you get somewhere can be at least as important as where you're going.”
― Ryan North, Adventure Time, Vol. 3

“Dude, trouble's just an adventure you haven't finished yet!" - Jake the Dog”
― Ryan North, Adventure Time, Vol. 5

“This was a really amazing part of your adventure, Hamlet. You’re sure that, should you ever one day write a book about this story or perhaps a stage production, you’d DEFINITELY include this scene. Why, you’d have to be literally crazy to write a story where you journey to England, get attacked by pirates — actual pirates! — but then just sum up that whole adventure in a single sentence. Hah! That’d be the worst. Who puts a pirate-attack scene in their story and doesn’t show it to the audience? Hopefully nobody, that’s who! Even from a purely structural viewpoint, you’ve got to give the audience something awesome to make up for all the introspection you’ve been doing; that just seems pretty obvious is all.”
― Ryan North, To Be or Not to Be

“Specialization gives the people in your civilization the opportunity to go further in any direction of study than any other human has gone before. It unlocks doctors who can devote their entire lives to curing disease, librarians who can devote their entire lives to ensuring the accumulated knowledge of humanity remains safe and accessible, and writers who, fresh out of school, take the first job they find and devote the most productive years of their lives to writing corporate repair manuals for rental-market time machines that their bosses almost certainly don't even read,* ironically for so little money that they can't possibly afford to go back and fix that one horrible, horrible mistake.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: Rebuild All of Civilization

“You might think that people in the business of selling books would be against places where you can read books for free, but here is a secret: libraries are awesome, librarians are even *more* awesome, and both are among the greatest things civilization has given us. *No apologies; it's true.*”
― Ryan North, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 5: Like I'm the Only Squirrel in the World

“It's hard to get motivated fixing a compile-time syntax error when you can buy a powder that turns a house into a monster.”
― Ryan North

“Chicks, man, am I right? They crazy," you say.
"Yes, what IS the deal with over half the human population of the planet? They're definitely all 100% insane," Horatio replies sarcastically.”
― Ryan North, To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure

“Algebraic to the limit!”
― Ryan North, Adventure Time #6

“Cats are useful for killing vermin (mice, rats) but beyond that provide very little use to humans, except companionship, and even then only according to their capricious whims.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition there. —You (also, Indira Gandhi)”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew,”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“When modern humans first invented computer ray tracing, they generated thousands if not millions of images of reflective chrome spheres hovering above checkerboard tiles, just to show off how gorgeously ray tracing rendered those reflections. When they invented lens flares in Photoshop, we all had to endure years of lens flares being added to everything, because the artists involved were super excited about a new tool they’d just figured out how to use. The invention of perspective was no different, and since it coincided with the Renaissance going on in Europe at the same time, some of the greatest art in the European canon is dripping with the 1400s CE equivalent of lens flares and hovering chrome spheres.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“It’s brought you from the Stone Age, through the Bronze Age, and all the way into the Iron Age, which is pretty good for some weird dirt that you found down by the river.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“You can't live the life you want, and you can't earn the death you think you deserve.”
― Ryan North, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 1: Squirrel Power

“Babylonians used 60 as their base (which remains with us today when we talk about each hour having 60 minutes and each circle having 360 degrees; see Section 4) and”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler