Lilly Sullinger > Lilly's Quotes

“If you think this Dr. Williams’ files contain what we want, you need to find a way to confiscate the entire file. You must go to a copy store, scan the documents, and save them to a USB. Can you arrange to get this information after hours, make the copies, and return it to where you found it?”
― Karl Braungart, Fatal Identity

“Séamus’s eyebrows, like the antennae of the potato beetle but with a greater sense of grievance, poke forward as he delivers his first utterance of the morning.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“Each day a whole world passes away, largely unappreciated, numbly relegated to obligation, commerce and routine. One day seems as unremarkable as the next. It's only through the inexorable accretion of days, weeks, months and years, that we come to appreciate with heartbreaking clarity how incredibly unique and precious each lost day has been.”
― S.W. Clemens

“The television set then came after her, chomping its teeth.  Upon reaching the living room, the television succeeded at eating her body bit-by-bit: first the legs, then the body, and finally her flailing arms.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“That was a hell of a shot!”
― Kyle Keyes, Under the Bus

“Most people don’t know how to lose weight. They try different diets with good intentions and hope. They fail. They try again and fail. Then they often give up and return to eating for satisfaction and fulfillment. 

Why have so many failed? They’ve tried cutting out sweets. That helps, but it’s only part of the cause of their weight gain. They’ve tried counting calories. That’s burdensome and, again, only part of the story. They’ve failed because no one has ever told them, in clear, everyday terms, how we all gain and lose weight.”
― Rick Mystrom

“In contrast, the gratification and education received from Sanjit’s classes is slow burning, personal, and in a changing world allegedly becoming more attuned to and obsessed with requiring that money spent – especially on education – must yield tangible results, what many would view as a paradoxical dynamic nevertheless persists there, near Park Circus, Kolkata. No grades, no forced accountability, all voluntary learning.”
― Colin Phelan, The Local School

“We are God’s art. We are God’s poem, created to display His beauty and goodness.”
― Gregory Dickow, Soul Cure: How to Heal Your Pain and Discover Your Purpose

“It’s incredible to reflect on how much knowledge and growth power is contained in seeds.”
― Charles Dowding

“Giving birth does not make you a mother. Being there daily in good times and bad to provide, care, comfort, teach, sing, feed, clothe, encourage, discipline, clean, hug, pray, listen, cry, experience, protect, kiss, read, advocate, bandage, educate, coach, cheer, laugh, play and love unconditionally...well, that's a mother.”
― C. Toni Graham

“Truthfully, Professor Hawking? Why would we allow tourists from the future muck up the past when your contemporaries had the task well in Hand?"
Brigadier General Patrick E Buckwalder 2241C.E.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Paradox Effect: Time Travel and Purified DNA Merge to Halt the Collapse of Human Existence

“Part Three, that part of formal scientific method called experimentation, is sometimes thought of by romantics as all of science itself because that’s the only part with much visual surface. They see lots of test tubes and bizarre equipment and people running around making discoveries. They do not see the experiment as part of a larger intellectual process and so they often confuse experiments with demonstrations, which look the same. A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature. The TV scientist who mutters sadly, “The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,” is suffering mainly from a bad scriptwriter. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“You don’t much think it did,” said Alvin Hooks. “Your opinion is otherwise, it appears. But on what do you base your opinion, sir? You have not denied that my scenario is plausible. You have not denied that this premeditated murder might have happened in precisely the fashion I have just described, have you, Mr. Gillanders—have you?” “No, I haven’t,” Josiah said. “But—” “No further questions,” said Alvin Hooks.”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

“Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning—you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!”
― Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

“Fo' shiz.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

“There is here, what is not in the old country. In spite of hard, unfamiliar things, there is here - hope. In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He many not be a teacher or a priest. He may rise - but only to his father's state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“There is no universe per se. Nor is there a beginning, Big Bang or otherwise. We live in an energy field that recycles quarks, which format with given configurations, because they've done that before.”
― Kyle Keyes, Matching Configurations

“Giving style” to one’s character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“goodbye..? Why can't we go back to page one and do it all over again?”
― A.A. Milne

“...(he) reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“Amelia Bedelia," said Mrs. Rogers,
"Christmas is just around the corner."
"It is?" said Amelia Bedelia. "Which corner?"
Mrs. Rogers lauhged and said,
"I mean tomorrow is Christmas Day."
"I know that," said Amelia Bedelia.”
― Peggy Parish, Merry Christmas, Amelia Bedelia

“Indeed, analyst Robert Bak calls orgasm "the perfect promise between love and death," the means by which we repatriate separation of mother and child through the momentary extinction of the self. It is true that few of us consciously climb into a lover's bed in the hope of finding our mommy between the sheets. But the sexual loss of our separateness (which may scare people so badly they cannot have orgasm) brings us pleasure, in part, because it unconsciously repeats our first connection.”
― Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow

“The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.”
― Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927