Sabina Hahn > Sabina's Quotes

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.”
― Flann O'Brien , The Third Policeman

“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. ”
― George Carlin

“This is true religion—knowing there is a bond among all living things. Having understood this, there is nothing to mourn, because even though nothing can ever be retained, nothing is ever lost.”
― Hernán Díaz, In the Distance

“...it is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“May your feet ever walk in the light of two suns... and may the moonshadow never fall on you... ”
― Robert Fanney

“Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.”
― Terry Pratchett, Nation

“As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Once, carefully, they rode around a company of marching pike men, recruits on their way to being exported to other lords’ wars. Like Drovo, Pen thought. He wondered how many would ever march home. Better it seemed to export cheese or cloth, but it was true that fortunes were made in the military trade. Though seldom by the soldiers, any more than by the cheeses.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Demon

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Neighbours, as Jesus knew, can be a not insignificant challenge to anyone’s Christianity.”
― Niall Williams, This Is Happiness

“What better place to kill time than a library?”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”
― Russell Hoban

“Reading can be dangerous.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.”
― Heinrich Heine

“Who is Alice?" asked mother.
"Alice is somebody that nobody can see," said Frances. "And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her." - Frances the badger”
― Russell Hoban, A Birthday for Frances

“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
― Mark Twain

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”
― 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

“Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
― Mark Twain

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain