SarahKat > SarahKat's Quotes

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“[H]e never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“We are now a race of cyborgs. We long ago began to spread our minds into the electronic realm, and it is no longer possible to squeeze all of ourselves back into our brains.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Once, I remember, Father Abbot said that our purpose is justice, and with God lies the privilege of mercy. But even God, when he intends mercy, needs tools to his hand.”
― Ellis Peters, Dead Man's Ransom

“But the Alim laughed at this. 'And we know who they are. Allah have pity on the Anglicans! Samad, when the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intellect go away,' said the Alim, shaking his head. 'And one third of his religion.”
― Zadie Smith

“The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes when you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell;”
― Herman Koch, The Dinner

“I just want to clarify that I don't mean 'without my vagina' like I didn't have it with me at the time. I just mean that I wasn't, you know...displaying it while I was at Starbucks. That's probably understood, but I thought I should clarify, since it's the first chapter and you don't know that much about me. So just to clarify, I always have my vagina with me. It's like my American Express card. (In that I don't leave home without it. Not that I use it to buy stuff with.)”
― Jenny Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

“In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints–why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?”
― Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

“Alcoholism is a disease with many faces, and some of them look beautiful.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“One ox, two oxen. One fox, two foxen.”
― Jenny Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

“People behaved mostly well and then they died.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about, it is about US. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we MUST despise and demonize the opposition. If we get our identity from our ethnicity or socioeconomic status, then we HAVE to feel superior to those of other classes and races. If you are profoundly proud of being an open-minded, tolerant soul, you will be extremely indignant toward people you think are bigots. If you are a very moral person, you will feel superior to people you think are licentious. And so on.”
― Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

“To be all right implies an impossible phase. We hope for mostly right on the best of our days.”
― Marissa Meyer, Heartless

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It is a dangerous thing to unbelieve something only because it frightens you.”
― Marissa Meyer, Heartless

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Does an iris seek to repay the sun which gave it life? No. The mere beauty of the iris is tenfold thanks enough for each day the sun can see the wonder it created.”
― John Shors, Beneath a Marble Sky

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, "now I will remove my knife slowly - so let things be easy and clean; let there be no mess." There will always be blood.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer