Maddy > Maddy's Quotes

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling

“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off.
If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says "We're the same." A language barrier says "We're different.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“And I didn't choose it, Kat. I chose you.”
― Ally Carter, Heist Society

“Kat," Hale groaned, then fell back onto the pillows.
"Funny, I didn't hear a doorbell."
"I let myself in; hope that's okay."
Hale smiled. "Or the alarm."
She stepped inside, tossed a pocket-size bag of tools onto the bed.
"You're due for an upgrade."
Hale propped himself against the antique headboard and squinted up at her.
"She returns." He crossed his arms across his bare chest. "You know, I could be naked in here.”
― Ally Carter, Heist Society

“Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions--even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. Professions”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent. In Nazi Germany in 1933, people wore lapel pins that said "Yes" during the elections and referendum that confirmed the one-party state. In Austria in 1938, people who had not previously been Nazis began to wear swastika pins. What might seem like a gesture of pride can be a source of exclusion. In the Europe of the 1930s and '40s, some people chose to wear swastikas, and then others had to wear yellow stars.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern, just the slow erosion of self, as insidious as cancer. And like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience; a room in hell with only your name on the door”
― Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

“I didn’t want to die because I hated myself; I wanted to die because I loved myself enough to want this pain to end.”
― Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

“There is no getting away from a wave that has got your name on it. The tide will come in whether you want it to or not. And there really is not a damn thing you can do to stop it, reverse it, or even delay it. Forget it. You have to plant your feet solidly in the sand and get yourself anchored. And then you have to be ready to take some direct hits from the water. You loosen your body and move with each wave. You get salt in your nose and mouth, and the ocean racks sand and stones over your feet and legs. Your eyes sting, and you feel so tired. But there is really nothing else to do. The tide will come and go. The sun will be warm again, and the salt on your skin will remind you of what you have done. And you will rest your tired body on the shore, falling into that delicious sleep that comes from knowing you are right.”
― Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

“For so long now I have waited to get back to baseline and I have to go to exactly the same point from which I originally set out on these travels. My criterion for healing was to be able to go right where I left off, like midpage in a novel. I have aited and waited, but I'm still not back to that page. Kay and Lew try to tell me, in their own gentle ways, to stop waiting. I think they're trying to tell me that i'm never going to get that page. That I'm in an entirely new book now, most of it unwritten”
― Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

“All the romantic nonsense about depression somehow making one into a creature of unique sensibilities is easy to agree with when I feel good. Then I'm sharper, superior for having weathered something terribly difficult, or just plain pleased to having been gotten away with something once again - like the snow day after the night's homework I did not do. All of it stands up to the light, but it's bullshit in the shadows. I do not care about unique sensibilities. All I care about is surviving. My goal in life is to get through the days.”
― Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface