Ellesse > Ellesse's Quotes

“Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.”
― John Green

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he
only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to
cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will
exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can
look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all
the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an
illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a
string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad
condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other
moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what
the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“How … ?” she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn’t have to say the rest of the sentence, that Billy would finish it for her. But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. “How what, Mother?” he prompted. She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence: “How did I get so old?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“This was a pretty girl, except she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I think I would feel superficially sadder, but less fundamentally broken as a person, if I could just be sad about one break-up, rather than sad about my lifelong inability to sustain a meaningful relationship.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“...but all that really means is that I love my life, and I'm really excited to have it back again, excited to feel that its going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another—it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I find it hard to believe anything really bad about myself when I consider how much he loves me.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn't.)
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate, anyway?
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn't have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“What's everyone talking about?"
"The end of The Iliad."
"That's the best part," Marx said.
"Why is it the best part?" Sadie asked.
"Because it's perfect," Marx said. "'Tamer of horses' is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn't have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“When they had been deciding what to call their company all those years ago, Marx had argued for calling it Tomorrow Games, a name Sam and Sadie instantly rejected as "too soft." Marx explained that the name referenced his favorite speech in Shakespeare, and that it wasn't soft at all.
"Do you have any ideas that aren't from Shakespeare?" Sadie said.
To make his case, Marx jumped up on a kitchen chair and recited the "Tomorrow" speech for them, which he knew by heart:


Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.


"That's bleak," Sadie said.
"Why start a game company? Let's go kill ourselves," Sam joked.
"Also," Sadie said, "What does any of that have to do with games?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Marx said.
It was not obvious to Sam or to Sadie.
"What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever."
"Nice try, handsome," Sadie said. "Next.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures."

"That's an oversimplification of the issue."

"The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world don't you? I'm terrified of that world and I don't want to live in a that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Korea Town Los Angeles and as any mixed race person will tell you-- to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Why do you keep coming?" she asked.
"Because," he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because, once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children's psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. "Because," he repeated.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow