Sameer > Sameer's Quotes

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Things had faded between them until their friendship became just a vapour trail of sporadic Facebook and Instagram likes and emoji-filled birthday messages.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or longing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough , it is your God-given right to have it...I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted,
transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself, becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal. Because what occurs in an interrogation room is indeed little more than a carefully staged drama, a choreographed performance that allows a detective and his suspect to find common ground where none exists. There, in a carefully controlled purgatory, the guilty proclaim their malefactions, though rarely in any form that allows for contrition or resembles an unequivocal admission.”
― David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

“Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse...”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-five

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“But a violent act is an epicenter; it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I am tired of this impulse to wound myself so that I can prove that I'll heal.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“My mother was a very private person; exposure was the final indignity of her murder. Her violent end was illuminated in full detail for a hungry public. The curtains were stripped from her home; anyone could press their nose to the glass. But the beauty of her existence was not reported or filed, was not documented or reenacted on cable television; her light was blocked out by terror. I want to push away that darkness, to travel back through fear and reunite with her as she was before.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“All I knew was that it was not the shape of a restful body, that it looked unnatural in a way I didn't want to think too much about. She seemed exposed; all the other body bags I'd seen on the news had been flat. I hated the idea of thousands of television viewers being able to trace some curve of her, as though all the desirous eyes that had followed her in life would never cease looking.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“The worst part of feeling poisoned was that it seemed to wipe out anything in me that was gentle and intelligent and funny— all the things my mother had loved about me. I was devastated to think that if she had ever been able to come back, I might already be unrecognizable to her.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Sitting at my desk now, I pantomime this two-handed motion, shown to me by her fellow hand-sewers and friends. It's like a reverse butterfly stroke, an attempt at flight, at keeping your head above water.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“In the wake of a violent crime, people's deepest hopes and desires become a matter of official concern. Privacy erodes from day one.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Mom wanted to be sure that I was nowhere near the potentially dangerous person, or anyone else Teresa might invite over to the apartment— she knew that people determined to live in darkness will always find each other.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“After a moment the silence was broken by a shrill scream threading up through the woods... Hysteria bounced among the voices, passed around in a cacophony of urgent cries. Each call vibrated in my limbs, echoed in my thumping blood...But there was a frenzied power to the sound that it couldn't be children, that the voices weren't just reacting but broadcasting. Long before I learned that it was the mating calls of loons that rang out all over the pond, those sounds reinforced something I already knew: that love can sound like insanity and rage.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“But I held back. I didn't want to horrify them. I was learning that there were silences now, unbridgeable spaces between myself and those around me.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I didn't want you to see her like that," and I feel the old anger: I already had seen her like that. Why is this so easy for them to forget? Their wishful amnesia may come from a place of love, but it makes me feel terribly alone.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“She was tired of shuffling around, of living in spaces owned by other people— a landlord would just be another man to whom she was beholden.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Mom's face healed soon enough, but her nose retained a slight bump from the break. I never got used to that bump; I felt uneasy when I caught it in profile. At the time, I didn't understand why this tiny disfigurement bothered me, but now it's clear. It was Mom's beauty that Teresa hated, that convinced her that Mom could disrupt her relationship with Tom. It was her beauty that she'd attacked so viciously, that she'd tried to stamp out. That bump on Mom's pretty face was a reminder that beauty wasn't only power. It was also danger.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Some were genuinely concerned; others made their offerings with a quavery touch of excitement that I was beginning to recognize as a desire to get closer to the drama. I was disgusted by this excitement. It made me angry, but it also made me afraid, less sure of who was really on my side.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Cheryl Peters had already told me that the family next door, the third house I'd gone to, had also heard me and not opened the door. "They have two children," she said, matter-of-factly. But I was a child, too. Or at least I had been.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I'd decided the goodness of people's hearts was their own business. I hadn't experienced any when I was knocking on those first four doors that night.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search