Owen > Owen's Quotes

“Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There's thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband- and some of those stations aren't reputable, they're outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts”
― Anonymous

“Cats are like witches. They don’t fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There’s no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won’t know they’ve lost, and to be a real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There’s no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Be careful what you wish for. You never know who will be listening.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“Granny Weatherwax had a primal snore. It had never been tamed. No one had ever had to sleep next to it, to curb its wilder excesses by means of a kick, a prod in the small of the back, or a pillow used as a bludgeon. It had had years in a lonely bedroom to perfect the knark, the graaah, and the gnoc, gnoc, gnoc unimpeded by the nudges, jabs, and occasional attempts at murder that usually moderate the snore impulse over time”
― Terry Practhett

“When you look into the abyss, it’s not supposed to wave back.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
― Anthony G. Oettinger

“The second mouse gets the cheese!”
― Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

“Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.”
― Terry Pratchett, Snuff

“We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“The man or woman who is rarely lost, rarely discovers anything new.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“that’s what hope is. Stubbornness. Refusing to go down.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“I’d like to be known as Winter.” “Winter. I like that.” “I know, right? ‘Winter is coming.’ ” “What?” Black Winter sighed. “Why do I work with people who lack culture?”
― Todd McAulty, The Robots Of Gotham

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Fuck me,' I said to Toby. 'We're living in Isengard.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

“He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“The word “bollocks” is one of the most beautiful and flexible in the English language. It can be used to express emotional states ranging from ecstatic surprise to weary resignation in the face of inevitable disaster.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The Hanging Tree

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.

Or you don't.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society”. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
― Stephen King, The Stand