Vamsi > Vamsi's Quotes

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“So I want to say that of all the people I have known, you are the only person I regret leaving behind.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind—follow your mind.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?"

"No."

"You're never more important that you are then.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“God doesn't protect people from knives, sweetheart. That's why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.”
― Fredrik Backman, Folk med ångest

“We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we're more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Something my dad says...He says you end up marrying the one you don't understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“But we weren't ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“It's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“This book is dedicated to the voices inside my head, the most remarkable of my friends.
And to my wife, who lives with us.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Not knowing is a good place to start.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Love is wanting you to exist.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“It’s such an odd thing, the way you can know someone so perfectly through what they read.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We can't change the world, and a lot of the time we can't even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to...be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy either.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“If you’re having a rotten day, go buy yourself an ice cream soda and a new hat.”
― Bess Kalb, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (As Told to Me) Story

“Everyone needs the dress that makes her feel like she’s able to do anything she wants.”
― Bess Kalb, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (As Told to Me) Story

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero