Kaleb Phillips > Kaleb's Quotes

“I don't know how much value I have in this universe, but I do know that I've made a few people happier than they would have been without me, and as long as I know that, I'm as rich as I ever need to be.”
― Robin Williams

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.”
― Robin Williams

“Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.”
― Anonymous

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“In a world of locked rooms, the man with the key is king. And honey, you should see me in a crown.”
― Stephen Thompson

“So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right?
[Will nods]
Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.”
― Robin Williams

“Life is like a piano. White keys are happy moments and the black ones are sad moments. Both keys are played together to give us the sweet music called Life.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray

“Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“The first time you share tea, you are a stranger. The second time you share tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share tea, you become family.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“If we worry about the little things all the time, we run the risk of missing the bigger things.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“It’s never enough, is it? Time. We always think we have so much of it, but when it really counts, we don’t have enough at all.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“He hoped wherever he was going that there'd still be the sun and the moon and the stars. He'd spent a majority of his life with his head turned down. It seemed only fair that eternity would allow him to raise his face toward the sky.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Life is senseless, and on the off chance we find something that does make sense, we hold onto it as tightly as we can.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Never forget where you come from, but don’t allow it to define you.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“But a river only moves in one direction, no matter how much we wish it weren't so.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“What're a couple of years in the face of eternity?”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.

[Incorrectly attributed to Tolkien. It is a line from the Hobbit movie that did not appear in the books.]”
― J.R.R. Tolkien