Nicole > Nicole's Quotes

“So listen -- one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice it's original height.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“I need to move around a bit. To shuffle my surroundings. To wake up in cities I don't know my way around and have conversations in languages I cannot entirely comprehend. There is always this tremendous longing in my heart to be lost, the be someplace else, to be far far away from all of this.”
― Beau Taplin

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The best love is the kind that weakens the soul, that makes us reach for more. That plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It's like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“You see, one loves the sunset when one is so sad.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.”
― Tony Kushner, The Illusion

“You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, El Principito

“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.”
― Miranda July

“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.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let's go out and fight for liberty and so they went out and got killed without ever once thinking of liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose kind of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it? No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“What's so noble about being dead?”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Definitions of number, as given by several later mathematicians, make the limit of an infinite sequence identical with the sequence itself. Under this view, the question as to whether the variable reaches its limit is without logical meaning. Thus the infinite sequence .9, .99, .999,... is the number one, and the question, "Does it ever reach one?" is an attempt to give a metaphysical argument which shall satisfy intuition.”
― Carl B. Boyer

“you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“The issue isn't whether he loved you, it's how much. Too much. Love can be poison”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“I get this feeling,' I said, pacing a step, the ancient wood floorboards creaking beneath my boots, my power a writhing, living thing prowling through my veins, 'that it's all some sort of joke. Some sort of cosmic trick, and that no one- no one- can be this happy and not pay for it.'

'You've already paid for it, Rhys. Both of you. And then some.'

I waved a hand. 'I just...' I trailed off, unable to finish the words.

Cassian stared at me for a long moment.

Then he crossed the distance between us, gathering me in an embrace so tight I could barely breathe. 'You made it. We made it. You both endured enough that no one would blame you if you danced off into the sunset like Miryam and Drakon and never bothered with anything else again. But you are bothering- you're both still working to make this peace last. Peace, Rhys. We have peace, and the true kind. Enjoy it- enjoy each other. You paid the debt before it was ever a debt.'

My throat tightened, and I gripped him hard around his wings, the scales of his leathers digging into my fingers. 'What about you?' I asked, pulling away after a moment. 'Are you... happy?'

Shadows darkened his hazel eyes. 'I'm getting there.'

A halfhearted answer.

I'd have to work on that, too. Perhaps there were threads to be pulled, woven together.

Cassian jerked his chin toward the door. 'Get going, you bastard. I'll see you in three days.'

I nodded, opening the door at last. But paused on the threshold. 'Thanks, brother.'

Cassian's crooked grin was bright, even if those shadows still guttered in his eyes. 'It's an honour, my lord.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Frost and Starlight