Ani Cvetkova > Ani's Quotes

“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.”
― Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train

“All history is just one man trying to take something away from another man, and usually it doesn't really belong to either of them.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“The words you can't find, you borrow.
We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“The only difference between the sane and the insane is how many people you can get to agree with you.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“I have to smile when newspapers--so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind--speak of the 'double life' led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a 'double life'. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had--the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can't have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.”
― Phil Hogan, A Pleasure and a Calling

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.'
'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Sanity is a valuable possesion; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale