Cappy > Cappy's Quotes

“All Gotama [the Buddha] taught, it said, was a technique, the world's most logical way to reset your thought patterns in order to make you incredibly mellow and super chill, like Mr. Spock after pon farr.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn't matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again. aa”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really get answers. You just get better questions.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“No, it's not, Holmesy. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don't choose what's in the picture, but you decide the frame.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Break hearts, not promises.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: 'English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache...The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.' And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless,inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I'd ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“This cousin had a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence. She possessed secrets—about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation—that you would never know.”
― Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

“NEVER BLINK YOUR HEADLIGHTS AT A UFO AND OTHER DRIVING TIPS FOR MISSISSIPPIANS”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“After today's cavalcade of meth heads, being with Anna feels like entering a Zen rock garden.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“After a pause for breath, I add, “¡Vete a freír a espárragos!” although it's not clear to me why go fry asparagus is considered such a terrible insult in Spain.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“You know what makes you a real Mississippian?" I rant or maybe just scream inwardly while flipping off the Confederate statue trapped in my rearview. "Surviving a Mississippi public education, that's what makes you a goddamn Mississippian. ... If you don't have giant gaps in geography -- entire countries you're unaware of, major religions you don't know exist -- then nope, not a Mississippian. If you had sober teachers who could even spell matriculate then you're from someplace fancy like Alabama.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“So here I am, upside down in a woman.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not indulge in works of the half talented
Do not live half a life
and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
Do not silence yourself to say something
And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst
Half a meal will not satiate your hunger
Half the way will get you no where
Half an idea will bear you no results
Your other half is not the one you love
It is you in another time yet in the same space
It is you when you are not
Half a life is a life you didn't live,
A word you have not said
A smile you postponed
A love you have not had
A friendship you did not know
To reach and not arrive
Work and not work
Attend only to be absent
What makes you a stranger to them closest to you
and they strangers to you
The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists to live a life
not half a life”
― Gibran Khalil Gibran

“You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She'll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime's pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.
So why not be an owl poet?”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway – my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do. I”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before—and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies—for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners—swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence? When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries? Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual labourer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures? We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
― Rabindranath Tagore