Derek > Derek's Quotes

“Happiness does not exist in a place. It lives in every breath we take. You need to choose to take it in, over and over again.”
― Samantha Sotto Yambao, Water Moon

“There is something beautiful about autumn that makes things more beautiful. Out of all the seasons, it is the most honest about time. Summer and spring blind you to its passing with their colorful displays. Winter paints over everything in white. But autumn is not shy about things coming to an end. It welcomes it, waving leafy flags of red, yellow, and gold. It celebrates its sadness.” Hana Ishikawa”
― Samantha Sotto Yambao, Water Moon

“Endings and beginnings are the same point in time.”
― Samantha Sotto Yambao, Water Moon

“Death is kind and swift. Longing is a life sentence.”
― Samantha Sotto Yambao, Water Moon

“You’re afraid the real thing won’t match up to your memories of it,” Ramesh said. “And you’re absolutely right. That place stopped existing the moment you left. Maybe it didn’t even exist at all. Memory has a way of smoothing and polishing edges.”
― Samantha Sotto Yambao, Water Moon

“For the same reason all fools give up good things. We look at our hands and wonder what we could hold if they were empty.” She hastily wiped the tears from her eyes.”
― Samantha Sotto Yambao, Water Moon

“Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.”
― William Faulkner

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This