Elliott > Elliott's Quotes

“In twenty-four hours we have gone through more than anyone else has - I'm sure of it. But does that bind two people? Or does that just make us survivors?”
― Carl Novakovich, The Watchers: The Tomb

“I guess the fact that the three of us have had these diagnoses hanging over our heads makes us empathetic toward one another. When it is just us three, it is so much easier to be ourselves because we don’t have to try so hard. We all just understand each other and have become inseparable ever since.”
― Emma Thomas, Live for Me

“Any other man would have done either of two things by now: they would have tried to run, or they would have begged for mercy. But Loch isn’t just any man.”
― S.G. Blaise, The Last Lumenian

“What is it that inspires you? What do you love to do? What would you do for free? At the beginning of my busi-ness career, my why was to become a millionaire, not a good why! And why not? Because that is an aspiration rather than a why. Aspirations, I have found, won’t fuel me when the going gets tough. But a true “why” will.”
― Richard Polak

“The haughty bitch puffed up like a rooster ready for a fight.”
― Marilyn Dalla Valle, Westwind Secrets

“The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“Something that is yours forever is never precious”
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

“Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you're supposed to. Stay home on New Year's Eve if that's what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story. Make a deal with yourself that you'll attend a set number of social events in exchange for not feeling guilty when you beg off.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“that's not what I meant at all... that's not it at all.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“Would you like me to put you out of your misery, before I put you out of your misery?”
― Paul Cude, Bentwhistle the Dragon in a Threat from the Past

“Ask for an omen, then stone it when it comes -- de essentia hominum.”
― Walter M Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path. ”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“We all dream of things we cannot have.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

“But then, behind every great man . . . is a surprised mother-in-law.”
― Jeffrey Archer, Heads You Win

“The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The many-fathers theory instead posits that concealed ovulation evolved to give the women access to many sex partners and thus to leave many men uncertain as to whether they sired her children.”
― Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“It was deliciously pagan.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. "There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.”
― Ayn Rand, The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction

“The rebbe of elechów, counseling his followers to go into hiding, was alleged to have said: “Every Jew who survives openly sanctifies God.” Each Jewish survivor, he declared, is a hero resisting the Nazis because he refuses to extinguish his precious life.52 Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum in the Warsaw ghetto was reported to have said: Now is the time for the sanctification of life [kiddush ha-hayim] and not for the Sanctification of the Name [kiddush ha-shem] through death. Once when our enemies demanded our soul, the Jew martyred his body for kiddush ha-shem. Today when the enemy demands the body, it is the Jew’s obligation to defend himself, to preserve his life.53”
― Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945

“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

“Elpidio sensed that David had more to say but was holding back due to their friendship. He wondered why David had gone along with Emiliana's seemingly impulsive ideas.”
― Carolyn M. Bowen, Legacy of Shadows: An International Crime Thriller

“While an elderly man in his mid-eighties looks curiously at a porno site, his grandson asks him from afar, “‘What are you reading, grandpa?’” “‘It’s history, my boy.’” “The grandson comes nearer and exclaims, “‘But this is a porno site, grandpa, naked chicks, sex . . . a lot of sex!’” “‘Well, it’s sex for you, my son, but for me it’s history,’ the old man says with a sigh.” All of people in the cabin burst into laughter. “A stale joke, but a cool one,” added William More, the man who just told the joke. The navigator skillfully guided the flying disc among the dense orange-yellow blanket of clouds in the upper atmosphere that they had just entered. Some of the clouds were touched with a brownish hue at the edges. The rest of the pilots gazed curiously and intently outwards while taking their seats. The flying saucer descended slowly, the navigator’s actions exhibiting confidence. He glanced over at the readings on the monitors below the transparent console: Atmosphere: Dense, 370 miles thick, 98.4% nitrogen, 1.4% methane Temperature on the surface: ‒179°C / ‒290°F Density: 1.88 g/cm³ Gravity: 86% of Earth’s Diameter of the cosmic body: 3200 miles / 5150 km.”
― Todor Bombov, Homo Cosmicus 2: Titan: A Science Fiction Novel

“Even as she fell, her bones lit through her skin, he spun blindly, and drew the sword in a flash that would have made Musashi gasp.”
― William Kely McClung, Super Ninja: The Sword of Heaven

“Part of the hem floated loose. She spun around again—the fabric tightened like wool on a spindle. She breathed in fear. The boat was farther away. She swung her head around—so was the shore.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us, walking through the cities, working in the offices, lunching in the canteens, smiling and shaking hands and calling decent men Kamerad. That they should live on, not as outcasts but as cherished citizens, to smear a whole nation in perpetuity with their individual evil, this is the true failure. And in this we have failed, you and I; we have all failed, and failed miserably.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

“…the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can—in fact, must—be judged as right or wrong, good or bad.

While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy