Nick Bickel > Nick's Quotes

“You don’t have to be around long to understand the world is a frightening place, that life includes situations you have no control over, that anything can happen. Everybody needs friends and a family.”
― Jack Getze, Making Hearts

“His thoughts went to Kismaayo, and lately, particularly of Abdi. If there were a hero in this story, it was Abdi. Jon thought, this young man from Maine had left that war weary husk of a country called Somalia and had come to these United States of America to pursue the dream of happiness, security, and hope.”
― Mike Bennett, Las Vegas on Twelve Dollars a Day

“There had been that battle over the awful sign the city put up near his house when he was about seven years old, the one that read “Slow Children Playing”. He was so proud of his mom when she called the city government to complain about it and then appealed to the city council. “Why don’t you put up signs saying ‘Smart Children Playing’ on other streets instead of picking on kids like mine?”
― Steve Bates, Back To You

“In the next few days, he’d receive his verdict. Win or lose, he feared Jennifer would soon be gone. He stood under the cascade, head down, until the water turned cold. Jennifer was correct, as usual. The money didn’t mean a damn thing.”
― Mark M. Bello, Betrayal of Faith

“Everyone I have spoken with about working with the Russians in space exploration believes that the United States has learned a great deal from Russia and that Russia has learned a great deal from the United States – and that the entire international space partnership is much better because of it.”
― Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles

“You're not a Quaker, Jeremy. I happen to know you put beer on your cornflakes.”
― Kyle Keyes, Matching Configurations

“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”
― Nietzsche

“Little Engine That Could - "I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I know I can.”
― Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could

“And yet we cannot define as skillful killing one's fellow citizens, betraying one's friends, and showing no loyalty, mercy, or moral obligation. These means can lead to power, but not glory.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Flak accounted for far more air crew casualties than German fighters and took down more American planes than the fighters.”
― Steve Snyder, Shot Down: The true story of pilot Howard Snyder and the crew of the B-17 Susan Ruth

“The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alchohol stove.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“She cursed her gender. Nobody would have dared attack her if she had been a man.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

“It was my temper to avoid a crowd, and to attach myself fervently to a few.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“You have a peace about you. You have a wisdom. You have a way of living life that kicks my butt and pushes me around, and it beats me out of my idiocy and narrow-mindness. You, Addy, you, have shown me what life is all about”
― Heath Sommer

“Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.”
― Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

“we could not pray for
anything any more, because we would feel that He always knows of
something better.”
― Johanna Spyri, Heidi

“There are ignorant priests and ignorant people, who are all too ready to cry sorcery if a woman is only a little wiser than they are!”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“the attic was home to half the rats in Montmartre.”
― Jana Petken, The Guardian of Secrets

“Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.

With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them.

Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“I need a job; okay. Is that any reason why the job I get has to louse me up? Look. All I want is to get enough dough coming in to keep us solvent for the next year or so, till I can figure things out; meanwhile I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered ‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen old corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is they’re supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we’ll leave each other strictly alone.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Samie was one of those nosy kind of cats. He would lie up on the red oak limbs and watch every move I made.”
― Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows

“The officer grinned cheerfully at Ralph.
'We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?'
Ralph nodded.
The officer inspected the little scarecrow in front of him. The kid needed a bath, a haircut, a nose-wipe and a good deal of ointment.
'Nobody killed, I hope? Any dead bodies?'
'Only two. And they've gone.'
The officer leaned down and looked closely at Ralph.
'Two? Killed?'
Ralph nodded again. Behind him, the whole island was shuddering with flame. The officer knew, as a rule, when people were telling the truth. He whistled softly.”
― William Golding

“Tomorrow is just as real a thing as yesterday. So is day after next, and the rest of them. Because you cannot see the future, it does not follow that it is not there. Your own path may vary widely, but the piece of country you are to travel is solid and real.
We have been most erroneously taught not to think of the future; to live only in the present: and at the same time we have been taught to guide our lives by an ideal of the remotest possible future - a postmortem eternity.
Between the contradictory ideals of this paradox, most of us drag along, forced by the exigencies of business to consider some future, but ignoring most of it. A single human life is short enough to be well within range of anybody's mind. Allow for it eighty years: if you don't have eight you are that much in - so much less to plan for.
Sit down wherever you happen to be; under twenty, over fifty, anywhere on the road; lift your eyes from your footsteps, and "look before and after."
Look back, see the remarkable wiggling sort of path you have made; see the places where you made no progress at all, but simply tramped up and down without taking a step. Ask yourself: "If I had thought about what I should be feeling toady, would I have behaved as I did then?" Quite probably not.
But why not? Why not, in deciding on own's path and gait at a given moment, consider that inevitable advancing future? Come it will; but how it comes, what it is, depends on us.
Then look ahead; not merely just before your nose, but way ahead. It is a good and wholesome thing to plan out one's whole life; as one thinks it is likely to be; as one desires it should be; and then act accordingly. Suppose you are about twenty-five. Consider a number of persons of fifty or sixty, and how they look.
Do you want to look like that? What sort of a body do you want at fifty?
It is in your hands to make. In health, in character, in business, in friendship, in love, in happiness; your future is very largely yours to make.
Then why not make it?
Suppose you are thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. So long as you have a year before you it is worth while to consider it in advance.
Live as a whole, not in disconnected fractions.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“I got a feeling this whole thing is going to come apart like wet bread.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“إذ لم يكن من المرغوب فيه أن يكون لدى عامة الشعب وعي سياسي قوي , فكل ما هو مطلوب منهم وطنية بدائية يمكن اللجوء إليها حينما يستلزم الأمر.”
― جورج أورويل, 1984

“Now one day, maybe I can forgive John Andersen for what he done to these trees, but I ain't gonna forget it. I figure forgiving is not letting something nag at you—rotting you out.”
― Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry