Adelina Excell > Adelina's Quotes

“Each time Olan Chapman comes to life, his anti-quarks remain on the far side of the Time Wall. After his life cycle ends, his quarks collapse back to these roots, and – presto – America's most wanted man is ready for his next adventure.”
― Kyle Keyes, Worm Holes

“No need to be afraid. I’m just a Holon.”
“Huh?”
“A Holon. What are you?”
“You mean who am I?” I correct him.
“No, what are you?”
“I’m not a what. I’m a who.”
“How can you be a who if you’re not a what?”
“What?”
― Robyn Mundell, Brainwalker

“It will pain me to see you two make fools of yourselves trying to avoid one another."
"I barely see him, I won't look foolish."
Valgu looked unconvinced.
"The times I do see him, I can use one of your aloof expressions that I've been practicing."
"Good idea, he'll never see through that."
"I'm not going to cry openly, or sit around pining for him. I'll pretend it doesn't hurt, until it really doesn't. I know how to do that.”
― Andrea Luhman, Missing Wings

“Toni's Talk: When you invest in yourself, you have instant credibility with your biggest critic...you! As soon as you let doubt creep in---you lose that investment. Make a daily commitment to assess your worth with positive affirmations and watch your investment grow.”
― C.Toni Graham

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“His people believed that the Mother had first created a spirit world, and the spirits of all things in it were perfect. The spirits then produced living copies of themselves, to populate the ordinary world. The spirit was the model, the pattern from which all things were derived, but no copy could be as perfect as the original; not even the spirits themselves could make perfect copies, that was why each was different.”
― Jean M. Auel, The Mammoth Hunters

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“Quality ... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others ... but what's the betterness? ... So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”
― Barack Obama

“Any day that we are privileged to work at the chalk face is a good one," Van der Huffen replied dryly.
"We should pay the Department for the privilege," Bruce Smith, Head Teacher Creative Arts and Languages, replied.
"I believe that many of us have; the coin is sweat, fat, and tears.”
― Christine M Knight

“I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.”
― Richard Adams

“There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us, walking through the cities, working in the offices, lunching in the canteens, smiling and shaking hands and calling decent men Kamerad. That they should live on, not as outcasts but as cherished citizens, to smear a whole nation in perpetuity with their individual evil, this is the true failure. And in this we have failed, you and I; we have all failed, and failed miserably.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

“That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“What I'm sure of is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain 'superior beings' who think that money isn't necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly.... For a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That's the only problem that's ever interested me.... To have money is to have time. That's my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.... Everything for happiness, against the world which surrounds us with its violence and its stupidity.... All the cruelty of our civilization can be measured by this one axiom: happy nations have no history.”
― Albert Camus

“Soldiers, I am sorry to say, steal everything.” He thought for a moment and then added, “Or at least ours do.” How”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.”
― Scott Peck

“I'm sorry Finn. I'm a wooden-headed dummy.'
Don't be so hard on yourself,' said Finn. 'You're just a straw-brained scarecrow.”
― Shannon Hale, River Secrets

“Bite me”
― Rachel Caine, Glass Houses

“In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Why not? Why not be your own man for once in your life — do what you want to — not what other people want you to?”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange