Keith Knerr > Keith's Quotes

“It’s called walking by faith, not sitting by faith”
― Daniel Mangena

“Sitting down on the bed, my mind went blank again. I laid my head on the pillow and closed my eyes. Dad is dead. My father is dead and I will never be able to talk to him again. I opened my eyes and checked the time. Almost 6am.”
― Behcet Kaya, Body In The Woods

“Reality smacked like a bucket of ice water.”
― Marilyn Dalla Valle, Westwind Secrets

“You can’t save anyone who wouldn’t save themselves without you. It’s the hardest lesson to learn in life, take it from me.
- p. 47, The Brothers Silver”
― Marc Jampole, The Brothers Silver

“A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“I guess it’s a lot better to initiate change while you can than it is to try to react and adjust to it. Maybe we should move our own Cheese.” “What”
― Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

“They all looked very much like the residents of any small valley to which you've never been.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.”
― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

“I don’t eat cauliflower,” said Tizzard after thinking about it for a while. “My dad says that ‘a cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education’.”
“I think that’s Mark Twain,” said Windflower.
“And my dad,” said Tizzard.”
― Mike Martin, Too Close For Comfort

“You shall address me as ‘My Dearest’,’ he repeated in a mocking voice, trying to copy her tone. ‘You will forget all about this conversation when you leave this room.’ It was interesting that tone; it had a sort of hypnotising ring to it.”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“George’s utterance of the nest and the trap belonged to a bigger mystery she did not yet understand. One day I will, she promised herself. She would stake her life that those last words from her son would be solved by her. They were steppingstones into… whatever the wind and the stars and the valiant trees held for her.”
― Susan Rowland, Murder on Family Grounds

“Ok, first things first,’ said Amercron assertively, ‘Bab’s where are we exactly?’
There was another of those silences, which in his current adrenalin fuelled state, he hadn’t the patience for. ‘Well?’
‘Well Honey, were in space.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Inara

“Keep those eyes of yours, mate, wide-fucking-open. Never know when it’s watching.”
― Adam Scott Huerta, Motive Black

“Whither be the heart of Justice?
            Lo, in stone, child. Lo, in stone.
            Whither be the heart of Justice?
            Lo, tis fast in stone.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Geistig begabte Menschen, die auf einem Thron oder in seiner Nähe geboren sind, verlieren häufig das Feingefühl. Um sie herum ist freimütige Unterhaltung verpönt; sie erscheint ihnen grob. Sie wollen nur Masken sehen und maßen sich doch ein Urteil über die Schönheit der Gesichtsfarbe an.”
― Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma

“Maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!”
― Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus

“I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it.”
― Sara Gruen, At the Water's Edge

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a "population" of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience.

Similar considerations arise with regard to recover and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this.

And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life