Paula > Paula's Quotes

“Oh yes," said Nanny Piggins. "I can regale people with anecdotes from my sordid past and think at the same time.”
― R.A. Spratt, The Adventures of Nanny Piggins

“quoting Kipling, "I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to mankind.”
― Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.”
― Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History

“No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“If you want to please me very much, you will fall down when I shoot you," -Oates
The White Darkness”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.”
― Stephen Colbert

“We can't all be investigating non-coding DNA," I said, feeling an upsurge of gastric acid. "Some of us have to sell bullshit self-improvement courses”
― Russell Hoban

“People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: 'This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: 'This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.”
― Russell Hoban

“And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.”
― Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker

“Why would a vampire create a younger vampire if there was a possibility the young one might end up destroying the old one?'

Stephin stared. 'If you can explain to me how this is different from parenting in general I might know how to answer that.”
― Adam Rex, Fat Vampire: A Great Fall and Halloween Read for Teens

“Project: Potential was a separate class that the gifted students went to for an hour each day. The name was supposed to make it exciting, like Code Name: Cursive or Mission: State Capitals.”
― Adam Rex, Cold Cereal

“Well, for future reference, this is my serious face.”
― Derek Landy, Dark Days

“Valkyrie dialed Skulduggery's number and he picked up. 'Hey,' she said, 'It's me.'
Skulduggery paused. 'No it's not. If it were me, then I'd be talking to myself, and I don't do that any more. I certainly don't RING myself. That's one of the first signs of madness, and if it's not, it should be.'
She sighed. 'Are you finished talking nonsense?'
'I haven't talked nonsense all morning. I miss it.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad.”
― John Varley, Titan

“Comatose, Pa's wife, the slobstress, buried an armchair beneath her bulk.”
― Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Secrets...are the very root of cool.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“It's hard not to be happy when you're eating a big steak.”
― Laurel Snyder, Bigger than a Bread Box

“I looked out through the window at the road that led from hideous rooms like this to a safe refuge hidden deep in the ground somewhere in Kansas.”
― John Darnielle

“Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!”
― Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker

“It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Why do the X-Men need another girl telepath?” she asked. “This one has purple hair.” “It’s all so sexist.” Park’s eyes got wide. Well, sort of wide. Sometimes she wondered if the shape of his eyes affected how he saw things. That was probably the most racist question of all time. “The X-Men aren’t sexist,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re a metaphor for acceptance; they’ve sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them.” “Yeah,” she said, “but—” “There’s no but,” he said, laughing. “But,” Eleanor insisted, “the girls are all so stereotypically girly and passive. Half of them just think really hard. Like that’s their superpower, thinking. And Shadowcat’s power is even worse—she disappears.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. ”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked