Elsa Triin > Elsa's Quotes

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!”
― Iain M. Banks, Excession

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“No more let life divide what death can join together.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."
Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Have you ever noticed how ‘What the hell’ is always the right decision to make?”
― Terry Johnson, Insignificance

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

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

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I don't really like you, but I'm so good at acting as if I do that it's basically the same thing.”
― Lisa Scottoline, Every Fifteen Minutes

“Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I'm an 'intelligent' sociopath. I don't have problems with drugs, I don't commit crimes, I don't take pleasure in hurting people, and I don't typically have relationship problems. I do have a complete lack of empathy. But I consider that an advantage, most of the time. Do I know the difference between right and wrong, and do I want to be good? Sure. ... A peaceful and orderly world is a more comfortable world for me to live in. So do I avoid breaking the law because it's 'right'? No, I avoid breaking the law because it makes sense.”
― M. E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

“Prisons are full of sociopaths and psychopaths, but when questioned, the imprisoned sociopath will honestly admit that they will commit any number of crimes to help a friend.

A friend will help you move; a true friend will help you move a body.

A friend will bail you out of jail; a true friend will be sitting beside you.

Who wouldn’t want to have a true friend? But they sound a lot like a sociopath.”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade

“I'm not sure I understand what love is. It's like 'good'. No one's explained it clearly. I love ice-cream. I love chess and mathematics. I love getting what I want. I love getting away with things. But not people. They're either useful or they're not.”
― Justine Larbalestier, My Sister Rosa

“Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“I'm a good person," I said, "because I know what good people are supposed to act like, and I copy them.”
― Dan Wells, I Am Not a Serial Killer

“Exposure to nature - cold, heat, water - is the most dehumanizing way to die. Violence is passionate and real - the final moments as you struggle for your life, firing a gun or wrestling a mugger or screaming for help, your heart pumps loudly and your body tingles with energy; you are alert and awake and, for that brief moment, more alive and human than you've ever been before. Not so with nature.
At the mercy of the elements the opposite happens: your body slows, your thoughts grow sluggish, and you realize just how mechanical you really are. Your body is a machine, full of tubes and valves and motors, of electrical signals and hydraulic pumps, and they function properly only within a certain range of conditions. As temperatures drop, your machine breaks down. Cells begin to freeze and shatter; muscles use more energy to do less; blood flows too slowly, and to the wrong places. Your sense fade, your core temperature plummets, and your brain fires random signals that your body is too weak to interpret or follow. In that stat you are no longer a human being, you are a malfunction - an engine without oil, grinding itself to pieces in its last futile effort to complete its last meaningless task.”
― Dan Wells, I Am Not a Serial Killer