Van Cabido > Van's Quotes

“Edward had used work and accomplishments throughout his life to keep the misery at bay. He’d endured so much heartache in the first eighteen years of life that he’d chosen to run from any further possibility of that happening again. Work was the way he accomplished that.”
― Steven Decker, One More Life to Live

“Oscar looked up from his plate, and if a cat could laugh, he would have. ‘Boy, that’s ugly, even for a jinn. Looks like a cross between a rat, a frog and a bottlebrush.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“If one does not react to gossip, the informer hushes more quickly.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“The holiday village had sprung up in Bryant Park, and the ice rink and booths were bustling with early Christmas shoppers. It smelled like fried food and scented candles, mixed with the occasional blast of diesel from the traffic inching along 42nd Street. When I think of how New York City smells, this is it.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“Aurelia, not all those women are uppity aristocratic bitches. Most of them are normal nice girls trying to survive in shark-infested waters, so if you want to make a difference, why not go in there and change the way things work?" "How?" Marcus smiled deviously. "By unseating the queen bee and changing the rules." "That sounds like a great idea, Colonel. Lead me to the beehive.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“Inseparable as sibs—strained as a couple.”
― Andri E. Elia, Borealis: A Worldmaker of Yand Novel

“Maybe that’s how it has to be. Maybe there is no diplomatic solution for this? Perhaps one of them has to die?”
― Cade Mengler, The Companions

“Just like a kitten that thinks its a tiger.”
― Stephenie Meyer, Midnight Sun [2008 Draft]

“…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“She looks very virtuous and very melancholy."

"Virtue is like the precious odors, most fragrant when it is crushed.”
― Baroness Emma Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“You shall address me as ‘My Dearest’,’ he repeated in a mocking voice, trying to copy her tone. ‘You will forget all about this conversation when you leave this room.’ It was interesting that tone; it had a sort of hypnotising ring to it.”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“Edward breathed in the sweet fragrance of the dogwood blossoms. The delicious air came into his lungs and passed into his blood, coursing through his veins with euphoric energy that he’d never experienced. He felt as strong as a hundred men as they passed out of the dogwood coppice and began the ascent up the hill. Their pace was leisurely. Edward could have run all the way to the top if he wanted, but no urge to do so imposed itself on him. For the first time in his life, Edward felt peace, down to the marrow of his bones.”
― Steven Decker, One More Life to Live

“Today I plan to smile a lot, only so people who know me will be freaked the fuck out.”
― R.D. Ronald

“The sunset bled into the edges of the village. Smoke curled out of the cottage chimney like a crooked finger.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Deliverance is not scary—it is the most beautiful, loving act of Jesus. It is the moment someone finally walks into the freedom that was always meant for them.”
― Kathryn Krick, Unlock Your Deliverance: Keys to Freedom From Demonic Oppression

“Good morning,” one of the soldiers said. “I’m Captain Joseph Walker and this is Sergeant James Vanetten. We are members of the One-Hundred-and-First Airborne Division, Fort Campbell.”
Wanda nodded
“May we know your name?”
“Wanda May Divine.”
“Are David and Thomas the first and middle names of your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Is he currently deployed in Afghanistan?”
― Shafter Bailey, Cindy Divine: The Little Girl Who Frightened Kings

“In a popular state the inhabitants are divided into certain classes,” Montesquieu affirmed in a Marxian manner a century before Marx! So, the popular state is a fiction; it is transient, fleeting, and for this reason — imaginable only. In its rigorous scientific sense of a class instrument, it is practically an empty matter sophism, a complete commonplaceness, an offspring of mental weakness. There is no such state! If it is a state, it is not popular! If it is popular, it is not a state yet! The State is a violent institution for social injustice generated by two main classes, which are main ones because they are at enmity… Any people closed in a state, are divided into classes. “For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich.”(Plato, The Republic).  Not Marx, still Plato said the truth!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“Rose waited for the night to bring her the same comfort. It didn't. Her mother was dead...she was now too exhausted to sleep -- and too heartbroken to weep.”
― Diane Setterfield, Bellman & Black

“Madlen: 'It's a relief to me, Lady Queen, that in your own pain, you take no interest in hurting yourself.'

Bitterblue: 'Why would I? Why should I? It's foolish. I would like to kick the people who do it.'

Madlen: 'That would, perhaps, be redundant, Lady Queen.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“He thought here you are Joe Bonham lying like a side of beef all the rest of your life and for what? Somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said come along son we’re going to war. So you went. But why? In any other deal even like buying a car or running an errand you had the right to say what’s there in it for me? Otherwise you’d be buying bad cars for too much money or running errands for fools and starving to death. It was a kind of duty you owed yourself that when anybody said come on son do this or do that you should stand up and say look mister why should I do this for who am I doing it and what am I going to get out of it in the end? But when a guy comes along and says here come with me and risk your life and maybe die or be crippled why then you’ve got no rights. You haven’t even the right to say yes or no or I’ll think it over. There are plenty of laws to protect guys’ money even in war time but there’s nothing on the books says a man’s life’s his own. Of”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.”
― Franz Kafka

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity