Rebecca > Rebecca's Quotes

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
― Timothy Leary

“Surviving these things didn't make them okay. It just let you know that you could survive them.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“You dug irrigation ditches in your soul to channel your fear, to guide it to useful work. But the ditches remained even when the fear was gone--and some part of you kept shoring up those ditches and maintaining the waterworks in case and until the fear came back. Because the fear had to come back.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“They'd set out on this quest without a wizard to guide them, finding the rules as they went. To do that, you read, you listened to jazz records or to the blues, you argued about hip-hop lyrics, you danced and you watched the dancers and you listened to poets and storytellers where poems were still read and stories still told. Sometimes you caught a glimpse, you caught a hint that others knew what you knew, that they had dreamed the path you now walked, or walked it themselves for a while.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Even after two years on the road, most of her experience of conspiracies still came from stories about them--and stories were meant to communicate what was happening to an audience, while a real conspiracy depended on everybody save its actors living like goats in a farmyard, ignorant of knives until they fell.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“The only difference between who is a witch and who is not is one man's mouth,' say the cook.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“But from what she been seeing since the termite hill, trust is one thing you should never put in the gods. Better yet to come to them in fear and trembling. Better even yet not to come to them at all. As for hope, that sound like it can be a good thing for those who need it, but for she, the only hope she need from the gods is that they never find her to make sport.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“Envy is what they have for us because we have one power no god can ever have, and that is the power to surprise oneself.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens? It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realized that they're so far over the line that they can't remember where it was.”
― Jim Butcher, Cold Days

“Living through a day was harder, for no matter how much I stomp one down another was always coming. Watching the little poison frog take on a day is how I learn to live through it. First rip the day in half, time to sleep, time to walk. Then tear it down more, then more, and more after that. Tear a day into pieces you can swallow and soon the whole thing will pass.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“For when the people flock to your house in mourning, people joined by blood or by law, it don't matter what feeling you carry for them, if you carry any at all. For grief is a burden that don't care about anything other than we bear it. You don't need love to withstand it, you need shoulders. I didn't discover this until now, that mourning is the work of many, and we have only us.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“The world is fickle about witches."
"The world is fickle about women.”
"Where in all this do you fit?"
"I'm not trying to fit," I say.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“Meanwhile, I watch and work up my rage at men, who can be villainous to all, but virtuous to some. Watching them be kind to children should make me think of them as better men, but it make them worse, for no other wicked is more wicked than choosing with who you dole out kindness.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“To be a man you do as man do. Master one thing and you can fail at everything else, for to be a man is to fail at everything else. Here is the one thing. What men do in all things, more than anything, is take up space, whether he be priest, king, beggar, or hunter. Whether he be living or dead. More space than he need, and more space than he will use.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“What we get from your side of the family."
"Woman who don't settle," Nsaka say.
"And where that get you?" ask the sister.
"Far away from here.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“No thought is wise just because you have it, girl.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a soldier. I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots. I understand how a wound can fester and kill a soldier, but there is still the initial wound, something that can be avoided with a little skill and a great deal of luck. Death that simply comes and settles is not a thing I had any experience with.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“Sometimes it's hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“If we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“Falling asleep quickly is the third thing you learn in the army. (The first thing you learn is to keep your mouth shut and let the sergeants blunt their teeth on the people who can't. The second thing is to never pass up a chance to piss.)”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier's heart knew that the monsters could get us.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it's generally cheaper to obtain.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“The sooner you people find that you can't depend on David and the Lord," Darrow said, "but get busy yourselves, the better off you will be. If the Lord was going to do anything for you, he would've done it already." (Clarence Darrow)”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

“Now, your Honor, I have spoken about the war. I believed in it. I don’t know whether I was crazy or not. Sometimes I think perhaps I was. I approved of it; I joined in the general cry of madness and despair. I urged men to fight. I was safe because I was too old to go. I was like the rest. What did they do? Right or wrong, justifiable or unjustifiable -- which I need not discuss today -- it changed the world. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men. Christian against Christian, barbarian uniting with Christians to kill Christians; anything to kill. It was taught in every school, aye in the Sunday schools. The little children played at war. The toddling children on the street. Do you suppose this world has ever been the same since? How long, your Honor, will it take for the world to get back the humane emotions that were slowly growing before the war? How long will it take the calloused hearts of men before the scars of hatred and cruelty shall be removed?

We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day. We read about it and we rejoiced in it -- if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. Even down to the prattling babe. I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life. You know it and I know it. These boys were brought up in it. The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was a part of the common frenzy -- what was a life? It was nothing. It was the least sacred thing in existence and these boys were trained to this cruelty.”
― Clarence Darrow, Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom

“Word is divine wish, they say. Word is invisible to all but the gods. So when woman or man write words, they dare to look at the divine.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“If it wasn't for these dead words some people would never know who they be. You out here thinking you doing what? Fixing a wrong? You think your wrong is the first? If all of your kind did read, then maybe the last wrong would stay the last and you wouldn't be here insulting books that do nothing but hold truth you can't keep.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King

“For the age of the voice is over and we in the age of the written mark. The word on stone, the word on parchment, the word on cloth, the word that is even greater than the glyph, for the word provoke a sound in the mouth.”
― Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King