Kristina > Kristina's Quotes

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“As with most of life's problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“I guess you could call it a "failure", but I prefer the term "learning experience".”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“They say no plan survives first contact with implementation. I’d have to agree.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“...when doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.”
― Robert M Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

“Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously,”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with “romance” in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it!”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“we tend to visualize future events very poorly and with a deficit of proper imagination.”
― Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

“Men, as Amundsen liked to say, are the unknown factor in the Antarctic.”
― Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth

“In the snows Amundsen grasped that it was usually best to lead from behind. He could see his men and survey the situation, the foundation of command. And the last man has the responsibility of retrieving what falls off the sledges. However careful the stowing, somehow something vital usually drops by the wayside.”
― Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth

“The information you have is not the information you want. The information you want is not the information you need. The information you need is not the information you can obtain. The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay”
― Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

“life is a collection of similarities rather than identities; no single observation is a perfect example of generality.”
― Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

“This is the essence of risk aversion—that is, how far we are willing to go in making decisions that may provoke others to make decisions that will have adverse consequences for us.”
― Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

“Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow