Jack > Jack's Quotes

“If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“You’ve no right to starve people, to punish them for no reason. No right to take away their life and freedom. Those are things everyone is born with, and they’re not yours for the taking. Winning a war doesn’t give you that right. Having more weapons doesn’t give you that right. Being from the Capitol doesn’t give you that right. Nothing does.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“People aren’t so bad, really,” she said. “It’s what the world does to them.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“There are monsters in all walks of life. One doesn't need unlimited power to create victims. One only needs to be desperate.”
― John Jackson Miller, Kenobi

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.” Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I’ve always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“There’s something horribly lonely about a place that’s almost home.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“The box isn't all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you'll find.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Fight until you can’t breathe, & if you have to forfeit, you forfeit smiling, make them think you let them win.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“So the manual for life already existed. It was just that it was already ingrained in everyone’s heads, and there wasn’t any need to put it in writing. The specific form of what is considered an “ordinary person” had been there all along, unchanged since prehistoric times I finally realized.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange--maybe that's what everyone means when they say they want to 'cure" me.”
― Sayaka Murata, コンビニ人間 [Konbini ningen]

“Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might be what make us worth saving.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“I had extraordinary dreams, and an ordinary mind.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy. We’re becoming capable of rationalizing anything. Maybe sentiment helps with the checks and balances.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Doesn’t feel like intelligence itself is the answer. It terrifies me to think of a world where we have all the same problems, a billion less friends, and everyone thinks they’re smart enough to be infallible.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“You’re working off a flawed assumption. Higher intelligence doesn’t make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“People with those kinds of ambitions—they aren’t like the rest of us. There’s a relentlessness in them. They think they want peace. They think achievement will bring it to them. It never does.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“And I was struck, again, as an outside observer, by how much the members of our species needed one another. All these people are out in the cold rain. To Laugh and drink. To talk about nothing. It was almost as if that need for connection and touch was our... their.. lifeblood.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“This forgotten fragment of humanity making a life together in the most inhospitable places…a thousand small kindnesses among people who had nothing to give”
― Blake Crouch

“Ending is better than mending.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World