Dean Rafuse > Dean's Quotes

“You used to sing a song, a haunting melody – always the same melody – but the words would always change. They’d be about anything and everything and nothing at all, just whatever was going on in your heart and your mind at the time. Do you remember that song?”
― Jason Latshaw, The Threat Below

“We know you stood guard duty at the White House, Reuben. We have film of you urinating behind the bushes.”
― Kyle Keyes, Worm Holes

“Heidi's role as grand master was to monitor all the women and to manage their locations and communication. Even though she’d done this many times on multiple missions, her heartbeat still pounded in her ears.”
― Kirsten Fullmer, Trouble on Main Street

“I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

“...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden

“A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“it is clear to me that things are starting to regenerate. There is a gentle tingling in my face, centered below the cheekbones that occurs from time to time throughout the day. At night there is a subtle throbbing in my throat that is accompanied by a noise that varies from a churning sound to something akin to slowly letting air out of a balloon. It is fascinating that I’m literally hearing those long dormant cells struggling to come back to life.”
― Traci Medford-Rosow, Unblinded: One Man's Courageous Journey Through Darkness to Sight

“Always have a 'Plan C”
― Zoltan Andrejkovics, The Invisible Game: The Mindset of a Winning Team

“He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius

“I live because I am a Warrior and because I wish one day to be in the company of [She] for whom I have fought so hard”
― John Bunyan

“A life is sacred or it isn't. We can't adjust what we believe just because it causes us pain.”
― Mario Puzo, Omerta

“Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.”
― John Gunther

“I knew that he would go out to the tavern, returning with eyes like glittering spoons.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring

“Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter. Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered, yet everybody was inextricable. The present war might be attributed to Mordred, or to himself. But also it was due to a million Thrashers, to Lancelot, Guenever, Gawaine, everybody. Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it. It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing of forgetting them.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“If poets use such expressions it is because they need them, because emotion and experience force them out of them, and so it is, surely, with me, though you think them unbecoming in me. You are wrong. They are becoming to whoever needs them, and he has no fear of them, because they are forced out of him.”
― Thomas Mann, The Black Swan

“In order to survive her tumultuous childhood, Mary created another Fat Mary, a companion and consoler, who took away her hurts, fears, and questions and kept them safe until Mary was older and mature enough to process the abuse and neglect she had endured.”
― Maria Nhambu

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.”
― A.A. Milne

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis. For Langdon, the meaning of these words had never felt so clear: In dangerous times, there is no sin greater than inaction.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“...for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“The answers were not easy to come by, they lay in the garden of the past, which memory had dug up and replanted in plots of its own choosing.”
― Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey

“One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.”
― Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

“You first."
"No, you."
"Why?"
"I'm afraid."
"Of what, my Sassenach?" The darkness was rolling in over the fields, filling the land and rising up to meet the night. The light of the new crescent moon marked the ridges of brow and nose, crossing his face with light.
"I'm afraid if I start I shall never stop."
He cast a glance at the horizon, where the sickle moon hung low and rising. "It's nearly winter, and the nights are long, mo duinne." He leaned across the fence, reaching, and I stepped into his arms, feeling the heat of his body and the beat of his heart.
"I love you.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“Everyone knows everything eventually.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder