Kian > Kian's Quotes

“Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“What makes the voice pathetic
is that it doesn't know
what kind of people it's reaching.
Us.
No one hears it, except us.
This Age wanted heroes.
It got us instead:
carefully constructed, but
immobile.
Subtle but,
unfit
to take up
the burden of the times.
It happens.
A whole generation of washouts.
History says stand up,
and we totter and collapse,
weeping, moved, but not
sufficient.”
― Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day

“…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it’s a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you’re thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be.”
― Tony Kushner, Homebody/Kabul

“Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.”
― Susanna Clarke

“I reached out my hand, England's rivers turned and flowed the other way...
I reached out my hand, my enemies's blood stopt in their veins...
I reached out my hand; thought and memory flew out of my enemies' heads like a flock of starlings;
My enemies crumpled like empty sacks.
I came to them out of mists and rain;
I came to them in dreams at midnight;
I came to them in a flock of ravens that filled a northern sky at dawn;
When they thought themselves safe I came to them in a cry that broke the silence of a winter wood...

The rain made a door for me and I went through it;
The stones made a throne for me and I sat upon it;
Three kingdoms were given to me to be mine forever;
England was given to me to be mine forever.
The nameless slave wore a silver crown;
The nameless slave was a king in a strange country...

The weapons that my enemies raised against me are venerated in Hell as holy relics;
Plans that my enemies made against me are preserved as holy texts;
Blood that I shed upon ancient battlefields is scraped from the stained earth by Hell's sacristans and placed in a vessel of silver and ivory.
I gave magic to England, a valuable inheritance
But Englishmen have despised my gift
Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;
Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;
In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it...

Two magicians shall appear in England...
The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me;
The first shall be governed by thieves and murderers; the second shall conspire at his own destruction;
The first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache;
The second shall see his dearest posession in his enemy's hand...

The first shall pass his life alone, he shall be his own gaoler;
The second shall tread lonely roads, the storm above his head, seeking a dark tower upon a high hillside...

I sit upon a black throne in the shadows but they shall not see me.
The rain shall make a door for me and I shall pass through it;
The stones shall make a throne for me and I shall sit upon it...

The nameless slave shall wear a silver crown
The nameless slave shall be a king in a strange country...”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost. ”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“Happy endings are still endings.”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“I learned failure early and mastered it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes

“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?'
26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.'
27 And the Lord did not ask him again.”
― Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”
― Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons