Will Ruffin > Will's Quotes

“However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays. The things these scribblers write!”
― Nikolai V. Gogol, Dead Souls

“I saw that I’d get nowhere on the straight path, and that to go crookedly was straighter.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not know it... Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late. I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you.

When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle, sinew, bone. It is all of you. When you walk you propel it forward....Then it sits with you. The pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend, steadfast. And at night you can't bear to hear your own breath, unaccompanied by another. And underneath the big stillness like a score, is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then, the pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against the mesh of leaves. Like a fish nosing a net.

This is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb, the dead never do ...”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“All the choices we can't see. Every moment.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram