Jess > Jess's Quotes

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“It doesn't matter if you and everyone else in the room are thinking it. You don't say the words. Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it loud enough and it becomes a wall you can't get through.”
― Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead

“Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more.”
― Confucius

“of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, the most terrible-and the most powerful-was the word. Daggers and spears left traces of blood; arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided. But the word managed to destroy without leaving clues.”
― Paulo Coelho

“A drop of ink may make a million think.”
― George Gordon Byron

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“A picture can tell a thousand words,
but a few words can change it’s story.”
― Sebastyne Young

“It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“You can't hammer in a nail with words..."
"No, but you can start a war with them.”
― Ben Galley, The Written

“How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?”
― Joel Salatin, Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

“Sometimes, she reflected, she dressed for courage, sometimes for success, and sometimes for the consolation of knowing that whatever else went wrong, at least she liked her clothes.”
― Emma Bull, War for the Oaks

“They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain.
And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the
luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war.
You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close
the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.”
― Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed

“Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right.

This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world -- "No, YOU move.”
― J. Michael Straczynski, The Amazing Spider-Man: Civil War

“In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.”
― Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint

“He says this is war. There is no shame in war. Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings

“Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door

“If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“I've got a sweater." Ben pulled off his coat and held it out for her. "Here."

"Thanks, Ben. It's lovely and warm." Then she said, "Ben, I-- I can tell you how I feel about-- about everything. I think you're the best friend I've ever had. I-- I'd lie down and die for you if you wanted me to."

"Honey," Ben said. "When I get you to lie down for me it won't be to die.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Joys of Love

“I am banished from the patient men who fight.
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light.
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight
They went arrayed in honour. But they died,--
Not one by one: and mutinous I cried
To those who sent them out into the night.
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven
To free them from the pit where they must dwell
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.
Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems

“Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried