Quillon > Quillon's Quotes

“These were both nothing more than a pair of minor incidents that happened in my trivial little life. Short side trips along the way. Even if they hadn’t happened, I doubt my life would have wound up much different from what it is now. But still, these memories return to me sometimes, traveling down a very long passageway to arrive. And when they do, their unexpected power shakes me to the core. Like an autumn wind that gusts at night, swirling fallen leaves in a forest, flattening the pampas grass in fields, and pounding hard on the doors to people’s homes, over and over again.”
― Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular: Stories

“The key to a wonderful life is a fascination with something.”
― Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past: The Three-Body Trilogy

“No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.”
― Boris Pasternak

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“And I loathed myself. I loathed myself for the state I was in. I loathed myself as an unlovable person. I felt there was something intrinsically monstrous about me, some rancid stink inside my soul that I had barely managed to cover over with the cheap perfume of my charm. I felt mostly dead and deserving of it. I had become an inanimate object to myself. I had somehow misplaced the knowledge that I was human.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“[...] even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“His recklessness or her ambition alone could not have done it. But like two chemicals which, apart, are merely mildly poisonous, combined they had produced an unstable explosive which had blown both their lives and thousands of others to hell.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Wisdom of Crowds

“but shame is like laughter. And inspiration. It doesn’t knock.”
― Stephen King, Fairy Tale

“Refusing to talk about something wouldn’t make it go away. If it was there, it was there, and no amount of verbal acrobatics could make it go away.”
― David Eddings, The Redemption of Althalus

“Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“This explanation might seem a little silly to us now, but they were grasping wildly for an explanation for the nightmare that had befallen them, and I think that in its outlandishness, the explanation touches upon the root of our fear: illness still carries a terrible mystery.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“You may say that it was the book, but it’s how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself.”
― Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library