Clare > Clare's Quotes

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“You didn't kill him. He would have killed you, but you didn't kill him."
"So? He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.”
― Tamora Pierce, In the Hand of the Goddess

“You look as scary as a buttered muffin.”
― Tamora Pierce

“Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong.”
― Tamora Pierce, Emperor Mage

“When you don't know everything that you could know, it's a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them.”
― Connie Willis, Even the Queen, & Other Short Stories

“What's the n-never-fail universal apology?"

"'I was badly misinformed, I deeply regret the error, go fuck yourself with this bag of money.”
― Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

“I have died and gone to the land of bad novels.”
― Gail Carriger, Blameless

“Ivy waved the wet handkerchief, as much as to say, words cannot possibly articulate my profound distress. Then, because Ivy never settled for meaningful gestures when verbal embellishments could compound the effect, she said, "Words cannot possibly articulate my profound distress.”
― Gail Carriger, Changeless

“Steampunk is...the love child of Hot Topic and a BBC costume drama”
― Gail Carriger

“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz

“The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Ginger: You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?... It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It's all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it's even possible to find out. It's all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It's all the wasted chances.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”
― Noam Chomsky

“When in doubt, go to the library.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett

“All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Oh, I feel very angry a lot of the time," said Tiffany, "but I just put it away somewhere until I can do something useful with it.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“Everything is a test.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Just remember you’re not alone here.” I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.”
― Martha Wells, Network Effect