Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“Plus, in one of his e-mails, the guy said he didn't like pancakes. What kind of asshole doesn't like pancakes? ”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“It is a pervasive condition of empires that they affect great swathes of the planet without the empire's populace being aware of that impact - indeed without being aware that many of the affected places even exist. How many Americans are aware of the continuing socio environmental fallout from U.S. militarism and foreign policy decisions made three or four decades ago in, say, Angola or Laos? How many could even place those nation-states on a map?”
― Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”
― Werner Herzog

“Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
― Chief Crowfoot

“A person is more than the worst thing he has ever done.”
― Helen Prejean, Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing

“I saw the suffering and I let myself feel it… I saw the injustice and was compelled to do something about it. I changed from being a nun who only prayed for the suffering world to a woman with my sleeves rolled up, living my prayer.”
― Sister Helen Prejean

“Who killed this man [Patrick Sonnier]?
Nobody.
Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job - the governor, the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man. (p. 101)”
― Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking

“Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”
― Thomas Merton

“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”
― Thomas Merton