Nina Lab > Nina's Quotes

“The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“I mistook stars reflected in a pond at night for those in the sky.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Czas pogardy

“An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Destroying things is much easier than making them.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.”
― Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages

“I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.”
― Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
― John Steinbeck

“When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Breath is the king of mind.”
― B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga

“People don't want other people to be people.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there…a clock without a craftsman.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals