Della Springfield > Della's Quotes

“The useful information for the millions outweighs the privacy of the few.”
― Newton Lee, Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness

“Coles faced her. ‘Better dead than–’
‘Is it?’ Lara asked, her voice cracking ‘Is it really? Because you must be absolutely sure. There’s no coming back from an extinction-level event.”
― Barry Kirwan, When the children come

“Quote of the day: (Opening chapter from, Heresy)

"He zaps from channel to channel, finally accepting to complete the job, bravely initiated by the alcohol, to further numb his tortured brain, and watch an emission, perfectly tailored for the degenerated masses, cynically named, ‘Switzerland has talent”
― Gary Edward Gedall

“Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for, like the meaning of your dream, or your dad.”
― Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.”
― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

“... yüzünü gözünü renkli toprakla boyar. Hem ilkel kabilelerin adamlarına benzemek, hem de kendi benliğini maskelemek için yapar bunu.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Old Korean adage, "Even jade has flaws." Or, in other words: Nothing in life is ever perfect.”
― Alan Brennert, Honolulu

“Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“was trembling”
― Fred Gipson, Old Yeller

“There were things of the times, and a few things that were timeless. The times came as a result of a particular human culture. The timeless came as a result of any human culture at all. And Cultural Man was a showman. He created display windows of culture for an audience of men, and paraded his aspirations and ideals and purposes thereon, and the displays were necessary to the continuity of the culture, to the purposeful orientation of the species.

Beyond one such window, he erected an altar, and placed a priest before it to chant a liturgical description of the heart-reasoning of his times. And beyond another window, he built a stage and set his talking dolls upon it to live a dramaturgical sequence of wishes and woes of his times.

True, the priests would change, the liturgy would change, and the dolls, the dramas, the displays--but the windows would never--no never--be closed as long as Man outlived his members, for only through such windows could transient men see themselves against the background of a broader sweep, see man encompassed by Man. A perspective not possible without the windows.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., The Darfsteller and Other Stories

“En cambio, cuando le escriba, sus cartas deberán ser apasionadas, incendiarias. Leer una carta de amor bien escrita es para una orgullosa placer de dioses. Al saborearla, olvida la comedia que representa y da oídos a la voz de su corazón:”
― Stendhal, Rojo y Negro

“People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Upped but mentally disjointed.”
― Beatrice Sparks

“It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.”
― Cormac Mccarthy, No Country for Old Men

“This was before the importance of set and setting was understood. I was brought to a basement room, given an injection, and left alone.” A recipe for a bad trip, surely, but Richards had precisely the opposite experience. “I felt immersed in this incredibly detailed imagery that looked like Islamic architecture, with Arabic script, about which I knew nothing. And then I somehow became these exquisitely intricate patterns, losing my usual identity. And all I can say is that the eternal brilliance of mystical consciousness manifested itself. My awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or imagined to be possible. ‘Awe,’ ‘glory,’ and ‘gratitude’ were the only words that remained relevant.” Descriptions of such experiences always sound a little thin, at least when compared with the emotional impact people are trying to convey; for a life-transforming event, the words can seem paltry. When I mentioned this to Richards, he smiled. “You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’ Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. We’ve got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.” In”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Oh you would have loved him. My Wilber was all heart. And farts. That man couldn’t walk five steps without tooting.” She gave a soft giggle in memory. “I do miss that. Not the farts so much, just… the little things.”
― Lucian Bane, White Knight Dom Academy: The Beginning

“A farmer once told me one of the greatest luxuries of his life was to wake up early only to go back to sleep again.”
― James Herriot

“الانسان وحش كاسر...انه يفعل مايختار. انه يسلك الطريق الذي يختاره لنفسه. امامه بوابه الجحيم وبوابه الفردوس متلاصقين, وهو يدخل ايهما يختار.. الشيطان لايدخل سوى النار , والملاك لايدخل سوى الفردوس . اما الانسان فأنه يدخل أيا منهما حسب اختياره”
― نيقوس كازانتزاكس, المسيح يُصلب من جديد

“It's one of my profound thoughts, but it came from another profound thought. It was one of Papa's guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach teach the teachers; and those who can't teach the teachers, go into politics."


Everyone seemed to find this very inspiring but for the wrong reasons . . . It doesn't mean what you think it does at the outset. If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go around the way it does. But that's not even the problem. What his sentence means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate scale is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm . . . They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings