Shawn > Shawn's Quotes

“What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”
― Stephen King, Nightmares and Dreamscapes

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“You’re not a child,” said Will, gently. “I won’t treat you like one. You’re asking me if this was your fault because you want to know what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling right now. Are you supposed to be beating yourself up? Well, that’s the wrong question. The world doesn’t care about your emotions.” “So what question should I be asking?” “Whether or not you would do it differently next time. Everything that happens matters only in terms of what you can learn from it going forward.”
― David Wong, Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.”
― Stephen King

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“There are two types of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day. But not Tony Stark, he's open about who he is. He tells the world he's Iron Man, he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn't have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You're one or the other - either you're one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you're not one of those people. And the two groups aren't even living in the same universe.”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can't fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it "sir" because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Anyway the trick to life is, if you don’t like what is happening, go back to sleep until it stops.”
― Catriona Ward, The Last House on Needless Street

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“We don’t do this because we can win. We don’t do this because nobody else will. We don’t do this because it’s the right thing to do. We do it because: Fuck them. Fuck people who use their power to dick over whoever they can get away with dicking over. It doesn’t matter if that guy’s a high school teacher, or a Wall Street broker, or a cop, or a demon inside the shell of a store brand Iggy Pop. You have to punch him in the face because he deserves to be punched in the fucking face. End of story.”
― Robert Brockway, The Empty Ones

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.”
― Stephen King

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

“A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“I was simply dying much slower than anticipated. But when you think about it, isn’t that all anyone can really ask for?”
― Jack Townsend, Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One

“Some parents let their young kids win at games, but mine never did.

I don't think it was because they were particularly competitive, they just wanted to teach me a valuable lesson.

Life is mostly just learning how to lose.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 3

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 1

“If you want to write a negative review, don't tickle me gently with your aesthetic displeasure about my work. Unleash the goddamn Kraken."

[on Twitter, July 17, 2012]”
― Scott Lynch

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman