Keith > Keith's Quotes

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Once I passed through a populous city imprinting my
brain for future use with its shows, architecture,
customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I
Casually met there who detained me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together—all else
Has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung
To me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Sometimes, when I clean a kill, I feed Buttercup the entrails. He has stopped hissing at me.
Entrails. No hissing. This is the closest we will ever come to love.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“It's hard to hate my prep team. They're such total idiots." - Katniss.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.”
― Albert Einstein

“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colin." Need I say more?”
― Chris Rock

“Knowledge is your weapon...Kill them with it.”
― Jim Butcher, Princeps' Fury

“Isana stared at Gaius for a moment. Then she said, "How can you live with yourself?"

The First Lord stared at her for a moment, his eyes cold. Then he spoke in a very quiet, precise, measured voice. "I look out my window each day. I look out my window at people who live and breathe. At people who have not been devoured by civil war. At people who have not been ravaged by disease. At people who have not starved to death, who have not been hacked apart by enemies of humanity, at people who are free to lie and steal and plot and complain and accuse and behave in all manner of repugnant ways because the Realm stands. Because law and order stands. Because something other than simple violence shapes the course of their lives. And I look, wife of my son, mother of my heir, at a very few decent people who have had the luxury of living their lives without being called upon to make hideous decisions I would not wish upon my worst enemies, and who consequently find such matters morally appalling when they consider them--because they have not had to be the ones who dealt with them." He took a short, hard swallow of wine. "Feh. Aquitaine thinks me his enemy. The fool. If I truly hated him, I'd give him the Crown.”
― Jim Butcher, Princeps' Fury

“I've got blisters and muscle cramps in places not meant for the touch of anything but a beautiful woman," Max spat back sullenly. "I've bitten my tongue so many times in the past three days that I whistle in musical chords when I exhale. And the smell isn't ever going to come out of my armor, I just know it.”
― Jim Butcher, Princeps' Fury

“That was a very formidable woman," Caisa said.

"I seem to know a good many of those."

"And you have a terrible habit of angering them," she said.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire

“Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get there at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it. And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things, they say-even their looks-will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools."
-The Professor”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“Just keep in mind," Liaro said, "they're not going to remember the words. They'll remember how you made them feel. Make them feel something.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire

“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty... It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.”
― Russell T. Davies

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. . . And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgment concerning whom, amongst the total chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“I invented that little rhyme about 'One Ring to rule them all', I remember, in the bath one day.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“The romantic chivalric tradition takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

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

“There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“True peace required the presence of justice, not just the absence of conflict.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon

“When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart

“Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.”
― Isabel Allende