Ivanq > Ivanq's Quotes

“I envy you, that it’s so easy for you to think of things in terms of black and white. I’d like to think I’m a good person, believe it or not. Everything I’ve done, I did because I thought it was right at the time. In hindsight, some of the ends didn’t justify the means, and sometimes there were unforseen consequences.” Like Dinah. “But I don’t think of myself as a bad person.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Nature of a compromise is that it leaves everyone more or less equally unhappy.”
― wildbow, Worm

“…And you’re acting like I should be able to read something in your silence. The problem is that speech needs periods of silence to be intelligible, to separate the words and keep it from being a steady drone of noise. To frame it. The opposite is true. To find the meaning in what’s left unsaid, we need words to punctuate it.”
― wildbow, Worm

“According to studies, clinically depressed individuals have a more accurate grasp of reality than the average person. We tell ourselves lies and layer falsehoods and self-assurances over one another in order to cope with a world colored by pain and suffering. We put blinders on. If we lose that illusion, we crumble into depression or we crack and go mad. So perhaps I’m crazy, but only because I see things too clearly?”
― wildbow, Worm

“Everyone likes the manipulative assholes after they’ve had a chance to do their manipulating.”
― wildbow, Worm

“So you’re following orders,” I said. “That’s the worst and scariest excuse in the world, really.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Things become a great deal easier once you realize how temporary it all is.”
― wildbow, Worm

“I don’t think humanity is noble,” I said. “Not in the least. It’s not just or fair on an intrinsic level. It’s not even good. But I kind of hoped we’d go out fighting the other guy.”
― wildbow, Worm

“We are a wretched, petty species, and we have been given power to destroy ourselves with.”
― wildbow, Worm

“When you’re in that position, sometimes the only people willing to extend those second chances to you are the people who need them.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Okay, here’s a cheat I learned in a leadership seminar. It’s called active listening. Someone says something, a complaint, or a criticism, or they’re excited about something that happened to them. For a lot of us, our instinct is to offer a solution, or expand on an idea, to fix or offer something. The key is to think about how they’re feeling, be receptive to that, and parrot it back to them. They just got a new car, and they’re happy about it? A simple ‘that’s excellent’ or ‘you must be so proud’ works. It leaves room for them to keep talking, to know you’re listening. For your teammate who just lost someone she obviously cared about, just recognizing that she’s upset and she’s right to feel upset, that’s enough.”
― wildbow, Worm

“She had been forced by the rules her maker had imposed on her to sacrifice herself for the human.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have anyways. She just would have liked the choice. Making sacrifices and doing good deeds wasn’t actually good if you were forced to do them.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Life’s not fair. It’s not even, not balanced, not right. Why should relationships between people be any different? There’s always going to be an imbalance in power. The other person might have a higher social standing, they might have money, or more social graces. Isn’t it better to stop stressing about quid pro quo and just do what you want or what you can?”
― wildbow, Worm

“You realize how small you are in the grand scheme of things. We’re not really the rulers of this planet, we’re just tenants, and it’s the small stuff, the bacteria and insects and the plant matter that really runs it all. Even the big stuff, the nasty, scary stuff, it’s all pretty small in the grand scheme of things, isn’t it?”
― wildbow, Worm

“I know I sound a little crazy when I say that, but really, you get a glimpse of these bugs as they go about their lives, almost mechanical in how they follow their instincts, you see them breeding, eating, building nests, and dying, and you see how they just saturate every aspect of our existence, in the air, the dark corners, the insides of the walls, they eat our dead. I can’t sense them, but there’re skin mites all over our bodies and in our eyelashes… I guess it takes me out of myself when I think about it, reminds me that we’re only one part of this vast system, we’re cogs in the universe, in our own way. Seeing the little details makes me feel like the big problems aren’t so personal, they aren’t as overwhelming.”
― wildbow, Worm

“I trust that people will improve, as a group, but we can help it along by striving to be better people on an individual basis.”
― wildbow, Worm

“But people were stupid. A chronic condition of our society, that so many people somehow thought they were special, the exception to the rule. In this panicked crowd, every rule was being broken.”
― Wildbow, Worm

“People are suffering all around the world. We ignore what’s happening elsewhere every second of every day, focusing only on our country, our city, our neighborhood, or on the people we see daily. We only really care about the pain and unhappiness of our loved ones, our friends and families, because we couldn’t stay sane if we tried to support and save everyone. Nobody could try to do anything like that, except maybe Scion. I’m applying that concept to a smaller scale. My family and my team, they take priority, and they take priority in that order.”
― wildbow, Worm

“I was swiftly losing faith in humanity. Not that I had much to spare.”
― wildbow, Worm

“And all at once he noticed something about the people around him. It was as though they knew, somewhere deep down, that the future was overdue.”
― Daniel Suarez, Influx

“Some of us wear the villain label with pride, because they want to rebel against the norms, because it’s a harder, more rewarding road to travel, or because being a ‘hero’ often means so very little. But few people really want to see themselves as being bad or evil, whatever label they wear. I’ve done things I regret, I’ve done things I’m proud of, and I’ve walked the roads in between. The sliding scale is a fantasy. There’s no simple answers.”
― Wildbow, Worm

“Damn me, damn them, damn it all.”
― Wildbow, Pact

“I’d done everything right, near as I could figure, and I’d still been screwed. The natural answer was that I’d need to do something wrong to get out of this. Fuck that. With all sincerity, fuck that idea backwards and forwards. I was not going down that road.”
― Wildbow, Pact

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars