Nick Dutton > Nick's Quotes

“That's what love can do for you if you let it: build a person out of all your broken pieces. It doesn't matter if the stitches show. The stitches, the scars just prove you earned it.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“People talk about grief as emptiness, but it's not empty. It's full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you'd have.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“There's no such thing as the life you're supposed to have.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“That's all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It's always open to revision. Yesterday's fact is today's question and tomorrow has an answer we don't know yet.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“The truth is, there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born from every action, whether it’s two atoms colliding or two people. Maybe reality is constantly fluctuating around us, but our senses aren’t equipped to detect those quantum variations. Maybe that’s what our senses are, an ungainly organic sieve through which the chaos of existence is filtered into something manageable enough that you can get out of bed in the morning . Maybe the totality of what we perceive with our senses is as clumsy a portrait of reality as a child’s chalk drawing on a sidewalk compared to the face of the woman you’re already falling in love with lying next to you in a mess of sheets and blankets, her lips still pursed as they pull away from your mouth.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable." ~~~~ Mark Manson”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“I want there to be nothing in me that isn't light and pure and good. But of course that's not real. That's what happens when you're a statue in a city square, stripped of any human adornment that can't be cast in bronze.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
― Ann Druyan

“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”
― Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art

“I remember, as a kid, when I first understood that only half of every tree is visible, that the roots in the soil are equal to the branches in the sky, that a whole other half is underground. It took me a lot longer, well into adulthood, to realize people are like that too.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Life is defined mostly by how you handle failure.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence. Which”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Bland friendliness is easier than spending even one joule of energy formulating an opinion on someone fundamentally irrelevant to you.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“You keep working. You keep trying. You keep failing. Until one day in the distant future, that for me is the distant past, the failure ends. That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“No one tells you it's all about to change, to be taken away. There's no proximity alert, no indication that you're standing on the precipice. And maybe that's what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you're least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Today's truth will be tomorrow's lie and you will be left questioning your own sanity.”
― Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption

“All communication is manipulation,” said Konig. “All interaction, social or otherwise, is a means of getting what you want. It’s the basis of society.”
― Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption

“Numerical superiority will win over superior weapons. Thus peasants are only peasants because they allow themselves to be peasants. Perhaps it’s what they want, though that makes little sense to me. They could as easily be the rulers if they decided.”
― Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption

“See, I understand what no one else seems to grasp. Communication is manipulation. Every time we speak we are trying to achieve an effect—a goal. We first learn to talk so we may better manipulate our parents. Sign language. Grunting and pointing. Wearing certain clothes and baubles. Walking or standing a certain way. This is all language and it is all manipulation.”
― Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption

“The doing is the easy part. It’s the deciding to do that is difficult. I most regret the decisions never made.”
― Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451