Barrita > Barrita's Quotes

“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“Take it from me, Fate doesn't care most of the time.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air

“Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

“The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Love and memory and thought and dream ~
My favorite poems have never been written in words.”
― Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman

“History repeats, but science reverberates.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.”
― Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books

“It’s so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.”
― Margaret Mahy, The Wilful Eye

“This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.”
― Michael Crichton, Sphere

“...teaching was the most rigorous form of learning.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Legends should stay legends otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.”
― Ian McDonald, The Dervish House

“A loss that can be repaired by money is not of such very great importance.”
― Anonymous, The Arabian Nights

“No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Minor magicians take pains to fit this traditional wizardly bill. By contrast, the really powerful magicians take pleasure in looking like accountants.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous

“Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Either a mother and daughter know each other very well or they are strangers.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don't know what it is. Well I do. It's apathy. That's the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives a Fuck.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End