Connie > Connie's Quotes

“Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”
― Mark Twain

“Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.”
― Robertson Davies, The Manticore

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
― Mark Twain

“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.”
― M.L Stedman

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.”
― Vikram Chandra

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
― Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
― Joe Haldeman

“Things don't matter, people do”
― Rosie Thomas

“If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion. The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image of my own psyche.”
― Robertson Davies, The Manticore

“Someone dehumanises you by violating your child and every human thought you had for them is broken, undermined, then gone.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

“It doesn't matter if I think like a boy or a girl. It doesn't matter anymore if I'm either or both or neither. All that shit seems so petty and immaterial now. There's so little difference between one human being and the next, it's just hypotheses, human ideas about life and the world and words that mean nothing, about definitions that mean nothing to Earth, to nature, to the universe. Boys and girls and intersex people and me--we're just ideas, and when we're dead, the ideas will go with us. It all means nothing.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

“Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever.Well, you could have. It’s the truth, and it’s the saddest and simplest thing. There isn’t just one person for each of us in the world. There aren’t many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, that maybe we still want to make it with, that press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn’t make a difference if you’re thirteen or ninety- eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Flick

“Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

“It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”
― Thurgood Marshall

“There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.”
― Woody Allen

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“So much of life was the peeling away of illusions.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“The fact that they were there, that everything they owned wasn’t enough somehow, disturbed her, suggesting a bottomlessness to certain kinds of unhappiness. She”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“Then he quoted from a French Jesuit named Teilhard de Chardin: “He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“The kids who thought of snappy things on the spot never had to worry about being fat or smart or pussies. You had to have a little meanness in you to do it. You had to be willing to embarrass other people sometimes.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“There were places, she now saw, that contained more happiness than ordinary places did. Unless you knew that such places existed, you might be content to stay where you were.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
― Mark Twain