Sid Schroepfer > Sid's Quotes

“Sylva was unmoved. “I want the threat of this child permanently removed, and I will ensure my brother carries out my instructions. I need details of the family, their names and where they live in Tamin.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“Dancer and Waif sprinted toward the edge. Picking up speed. Bad Ass on his one real leg doing a great job of keeping up. Kind of.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“As a society, we assume that humans naturally run from emotions like suffering, helplessness, and hopelessness, but the truth is these emotions are highly addictive and far easier to indulge in (in a perversely satisfying way) than positive emotional subsets. Better yet, when you convince others of your helplessness, some people begin to regard you as a victim—someone to be adored and protected. ”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“The Wallace-Ali relationship reflects the great mythic “hero’s journey.” Wallace might be seen as the Mentor/Wise Old Man, Ali as the naïve young hero who grows as the story evolves.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“I don’t think so, said the captain. Their ship is clearly outfitted with weapons systems that it did not have when it left Terrene over 600 years ago. And they are pointed directly at us.”
― Steven Decker, The Balance of Time

“The people at the center of these stories of power couples mostly choose to see their own motives as selfless. In Elizabeth Edwards’ autobiography Resilience, she wrote of her marriage to John, U.S. senator from North Carolina, ‘We were lovers, life companions, crusaders, side by side, for a vision of what the country could be.’ When she found out he was cheating on her, the crusading together became ‘the glue’ that kept them together. ‘I grabbed hold of it. I needed to,’ Edwards wrote. ‘Although I no longer knew what I could trust between the two of us, I knew I could trust in our work together.’ She wanted ‘an intact family fighting for causes more important than any one of us.”
― Anne Michaud, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Eight Political Wives

“Dear daughter, I won't try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Art was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you...

My job was to come back [from the convent] directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark glasses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.”
― Ralph Ellison

“The best slave is the one who thinks he is free.”
― Johann von Goethe

“C.S. Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.”
― Anthony Burgess

“The point is to be compassionately, not cruelly, honest. Tell the person what you have heard that worries you. Allow him to respond. You may be surprised at how much sense his answers make.”
― Nancy O'Meara, The Cult around the Corner: A Handbook on Dealing with Other People's Religions

“There was nothing ordinary about Ossie May. She was tall, sexy, smart, and pretty. Her looks and personality were her drawing cards. The flip side was her temperament. She was beauty and rage sandwiched together, and she must have invented cussing. She would unload swear word after swear word in rapid succession. There had to be a law against such offensive language.”
― Harold Phifer, Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar

“Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself, "Why was I born?" Then I answer myself, "You were born to be successful." If you can learn to define your own success and not let others dictate it, you can find      fulfilment.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“The thing about wings is that they are yours and yours alone. You cannot inherit them from an indulgent father; you cannot buy them in Savile Row; you cannot win them in a lucky draw; you cannot marry them along with a pretty girl; you cannot steal them on a shoplifting spree. You cannot even earn them in a team event. You fight and you struggle, you study and you learn, you practice and you persevere, and finally you do it alone, high above the clouds, in a single-seater.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“The Alchemy Scroll works on the heart,” he said. “It plants words as I plant stones. The Scroll-maker is my brother. He paints the mysteries of God while I, guided by the Mother, built the new Hall as a door to heaven,” he said.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“If you always try to subjugate people by coercion, because you are strong, then sooner or later you will run into somebody who is just as strong, if not stronger. Then you'll be in trouble.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness. Some say it is true that crime is bad, but would this not be worse? Is it not better to hold what we have, and to pay the price of it with fear?”
― Alan Paton, City the Beloved Country

“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Yes, the issue was courage. It always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn't help it. Noise scared him, dark scared him. Tunnels scared him: the time he almost won the Silver Star for valor. But the real issue was courage. It had nothing to do with the Silver Star...Oh, he would've liked winning it, true, but that wasn't the issue. He would've liked showing the medal to his father, the heavy feel of it, looking his father in the eye to show he had been brave, but even that wasn't the real issue. The real issue was the power of will to defeat fear. A matter of figuring a way to do it. Somehow working his way into that secret chamber of the human heart, where, in tangles, lay the circuitry for all that was possible, the full range of what a man might be. He believed, like Doc Peret, that somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe, or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse, that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a Silver Star twinkling somewhere inside him.”
― Tim O'Brien

“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“My grandmother's last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love, and tolerance.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Seeing the pictures every evening while finishing the New York Times and waiting for dinner was his joy. Francine was unaware of his pleasure.  He could not reveal these feelings to the children or Francine. Silly. A father loves his children but can’t speak of it for fear of being made trivial.”
― Vincent Panettiere, Shared Sorrows