Pumpkin Empanada > Pumpkin's Quotes

“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.”
― Tom Stoppard , Arcadia

“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“It is because good is always stronger than evil. Always remember that, Antonio. The smallest bit of good can stand against all the powers of evil in the world and it will emerge triumphant.”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“Understanding comes with life. As a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people - sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having sympathy for people. ”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“There are many gods . . . gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards, but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones--. . . . The god of the church is a jealous god; he cannot live in peace with other gods.”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“The gaze of her clear eyes held them transfixed. “You must understand that when anybody, bruja or curandera, priest or sinner, tampers with the fate of a man that sometimes a chain of events is set into motion over which no one will have ultimate control. You must be willing to accept this responsibility.”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“Why are they like that?” I asked Cico. We skirted Blue Lake and worked our way through the tall, golden grass to the creek. “I don’t know,” Cico answered, “except that people, grown-ups and kids, seem to want to hurt each other—and it’s worse when they’re in a group.”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“Ay, every generation, every man is a part of his past. He cannot escape it, but he may reform the old materials, make something new”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“i understand that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. i understood that, finally and absolutely, i alone exist. all the rest, i saw, is merely what pushes me, or what i push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. i create the whole universe, blink by blink.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., Grendel

“So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

“At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Everyone believes the world's greatest lie..." says the mysterious old man.
"What is the world's greatest lie?" the little boy asks.
The old man replies, "It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.”
― paulo coelho

“There is a clear pattern in U.S. history: When we need labor, we welcome migrants. When we are in recession, we want them to leave.”
― Sonia Nazario, Enrique's Journey

“Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.”
― China Miéville, Railsea

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
― Nelson Mandela

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“Man is more ambitious than patient. When we realize we cannot split a true atom, cannot conquer the whole Earth, we redefine the terms to fake our victory, check off our boxes and pretend the deed is done. Alexander”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Death, of course, has many weapons, and, if they have deprived him of a hundred million, he still has enough at hand to keep them mortal.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“Americans don't like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the torturous process of coming up with names for their towns. And really, why strain yourself when so many wonderful names already exist in the world?

The entrance to the town of Moscow is shown in the photograph. That's right, an absolutely authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province.

There's another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow.”
― Ilya Ilf, Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers