S.R. > S.R.'s Quotes

“DNA, you know, is Midas’ gold. Everyone who touches it goes mad”
― Maurice Wilkins

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”
― Charlemagne

“Insanity,” said Hatta, still mesmerized by his royal purple hair. “That always seemed the strangest word because it actually means out of sanity. Shouldn’t someone who’s in sanity be very sane? In means out. Curious.”
“And they think we’re the mad ones,” laughed the smiling Cheshire Cat.”
― Daniel Coleman

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Nonsense," said the witcher. "And what's more, it doesn't rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Xaden slides his hands beneath my thighs, then lifts me so we’re level as he lays expert claim to every line and recess of my mouth like this is the only time he’ll get. Like kissing me is more vital than his next breath.”
― Rebecca Yarros, Iron Flame

“The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

“Culture is like a smog. To live
within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be
contaminated.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

“She was like a star, always so distant. Even the light she shone on me was always cold.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Take those frauds who practice pseudoscience - do you know who they're most afraid of?"

"Scientists, of course."

"No. Many of the best scientists can be fooled by pseudoscience and sometimes devote their lives to it. But pseudoscience is afraid of one particular type of people who are very hard to fool: stage magicians. In fact, many pseudoscience hoaxes were exposed by stage magicians.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Evans: We don't know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Everyone likes to reminisce, but no one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Young people are all the same. The more books you read, the more confused you become.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Should could no longer feel grief. She was now like a Geiger counter that had been subjected to too much radiation, no longer capable of giving any reaction, noiselessly displaying a reading of zero.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end. On”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Let’s go drinking and then go back to sleep like good bugs.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“and the thoughts she could not voice dissolved into her blood, where they would stay with her for the rest of her life.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert.… I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Like a man with diarrhea in a sandpaper factory, sometimes all available options are less than ideal.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“Don't force people to live up to your dreams of who they might be.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“Each yoki-hijo trained in an ancient and powerful art. A deliberate, wondrous artistry requiring the full synergy of body and mind. Geological reorganization on the microscale, requiring acute understanding of gravitational equilibrium. In other words, they stacked rocks.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter