donna backshall > donna's Quotes

“Choose to love.”
― Monica Hesse, They Went Left

“Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I think there should be a rule that everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their lives.”
― R.J. Palacio, Wonder

“People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don't die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“The first time he'd held her hand, it felt so good that it crowded out all the bad things. It felt better than anything had ever hurt.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“It’s true, you know. In space, no one can hear you scream like a little girl.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Hiding the past never works as well as simply neglecting it.”
― John Scalzi, The Consuming Fire

“Is there any teacher better, more patient, more determined than fate?”
― Barry Eisler, Zero Sum

“Some people just need killing.”
― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade

“The trick is not to find the story of the century. You won’t miss that story when it happens. No one will miss it. The trick is to find the story of the day and for that day make whoever reads it or hears it care about it so intensely that it doesn’t leave them. Then it becomes a story of their life. Maybe even the story of their life.”
― John Scalzi, Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome

“There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in Western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me.

It's the beautiful thing about youth.

There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“No parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“My steps feel lighter now and I realize it’s because I’m running toward something, and not away from it.”
― Clare Mackintosh, I Let You Go

“Veronika had accused her father of being a misogynist and Thomas had told Veronika to stop acting like a pseudo lesbian intellectual.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Last Anniversary

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.”
― James S.A. Corey, Drive

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Neither of us is going to jail, you ninny. One day we’ll be sweet little old ladies and we’ll probably forget that it didn’t happen the way we said it did.’

‘I can’t imagine us as sweet little old ladies.’

‘It does seem unlikely.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Last Anniversary

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“When you grow up around people who don’t speak very much, what they do say to you is indelible.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“I’m continually confronted with the human tendency to ignore or deny facts until the last possible instant. And then for several days after that, too.” Attavio”
― John Scalzi, The Collapsing Empire

“It’s very liberating; I feel great. Long hair is so fucking foolish, I feel sorry for guys who have it,” he said, expressing the total conviction one finds in those who have only recently been converted.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“If Levi were a dog, he'd be a golden retriever. If he were a game, he'd be a Ping-Pong, incessant and bouncing and light.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“You think that holding someone hard will bring them closer. You think that you can hold them so hard that you'll still feel them, embossed on you, when you pull away.
Every time Eleanor pulled away from Park, she felt the gasping loss of him.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“However much you love your job, it ain't gonna love you back.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties. You might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Last Anniversary

“Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth