trish > trish's Quotes

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“We're more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“It's impossible to let go of the people we love. Pieces of them remain embedded inside of us like shrapnel. Every breath causes those fragments to burrow through our muscles, nearer to our hearts. And we think the pain will kill us, but it won't. Eventually, scar tissue forms around those twisted splinters like cocoons. They remain part of us, but slowly hurt less.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, At the Edge of the Universe

“Dear Rick,

I've never thought math was a miracle. The things we study simply are. They were the rules of the universe before we were here to understand them. They operate the world behind the curtain, whether we look behind it or not. The rules are already there. Music is a miracle. It adds something to the world that didn't have to be here. Language is a miracle. Every sentence ever spoken and every song ever sung is a new invention. Not only do they add something new to the world, they transmit thoughts and emotions that would otherwise be locked within one person. I hear a song and feel something a composer felt 200 years ago. I read your letter and hear your voice saying the words. I feel you in the room with me. That's the miracle.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“What, after all, is a video game's subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Early one beautiful summer evening, when everyone else was drinking indoors, Tony and I walked down to the river. We lay on the grass under a tree and chatted. At one point, Tony said, "Look at the pattern of lace the leaves make against the sky." I looked at the canopy above us, and suddenly saw what he saw. My perspective completely shifted. I realized I didn't have his "eyes" -- though once he pointed it out, it became obvious. It made me think, "My God, I never look enough," and in the years since, I've tried very hard to look --
and look again.”
― Julie Andrews Edwards, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years

“The habits of our lives makes us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world.”
― Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

“I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of all things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a sacrifice on their alters.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“If there is such a thing as complete happiness, it is knowing that you are in the right place.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me. ”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

“I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.”
― William C. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!