Bogdan > Bogdan's Quotes

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It's a pity both sides can't lose (commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)”
― Henry Kissinger

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“The biggest lies we save for ourselves.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“The day was dark as a lawyer's soul.”
― Stuart MacBride, Cold Granite

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Home is behind, the world ahead,
and there are many paths to tread
through shadows to the edge of night,
until the stars are all alight.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“If they asked how I died tell them: Still angry.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature”
― Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart

“Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James. “No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart

“The strongest beings are those who sing themselves into existence.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart

“The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows. But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.”
― Dan Simmons, Song of Kali

“I've always seen 'no' as a challenge rather than an answer.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.”
― Richard K. Morgan, The Steel Remains