Markt5660 > Markt5660's Quotes

“We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong — perhaps truth is love and love is truth.”
― Maria Popova

“Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“I need to ask myself, 'What would an Apollo astronaut do?' He'd drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launchpad, then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my Rover. Man those guys were cool.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“There is an English expression: 'high-maintenance girlfriend,'" Csongor remarked. "Now, of course, Zula is not my girlfriend. Probably never would be, even if all this shit were not happening. And I think that if she were my girlfriend? She would not be high maintenance at all! She is just not that type of girl. However. Because of circumstances, today she is the most high-maintenance girlfriend since Cleopatra.”
― Neal Stephenson, Reamde

“When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be “in command” if I were the only remaining person.”
What do you know? I’m in command”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“I am part of a minority that is deeply misunderstood. People have very confused ideas about us. Many are frightened of us. I've even heard it said that many people wouldn't want their daughters or sons to marry one of us, and I know of people who have been denied jobs or promotions because they share this trait with me. But being what I am does not make me bad; being what I am does not make me dangerous; being what I am does not mean I don't love, or hurt, or have a sense of humor. My name is Malclom Decter, and I'm here today to tell the whole world what I am. ... I am an atheist.”
― Robert J. Sawyer

“Finding the stewardess, Bly asked her about the monkey. The stewardess replied drily, "We have met." Bly was now alarmed to see that the stewardess's arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder."What did you do?" she asked. "I did nothing but scream," the stewardess replied; "the monkey did the rest.”
― Matthew Goodman

“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“For the longest time I ignored or dismissed the adage that time flies as we get older because I didn't feel old enough for the "as we get older" clause to apply. Lately, though, I've started to think that I am, and that it does. Time isn't speeding up; it's pace is cruelly steady, a fact of which I am ever more painfully aware.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“Indeed, he [Augustine] wrote, what we call three tenses are only one. Past, present, and future don't exist per se; they are all present in the mind - in our current memory of past events, in our current attention to the present, and in our current expectation of what's to come. "There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things".”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”
― Kage Baker, In the Garden of Iden: The First Company Novel

“Worldly institutions fail because they require power and gold to operate. Power and gold attract wicked and greedy people. Wicked and greedy people are corrupters and betrayers. Therefore, worldly institutions become corrupt and betrayed. ...”
― Kage Baker, In the Garden of Iden

“Take it easy now - I've got first-class references from people who've been punched in the face by me. All of them were completely satisfied.”
― Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Das Boot: The Boat

“But there really ought to be a film of all this: closeups of pure shit. Horizon bald as a baby's bottom, a couple of clouds - and that's it. Then they could film the inside of the boat: moldy bread, filthy necks, rotten lemons, torn shirts, sweaty blankets, and, as a grand finale, all of us looking utterly pissed-off.”
― Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Das Boot: The Boat

“I reserve the right to be unreasonable, inconsistent, and arbitrary in an unreasonable, inconsistent, and arbitrary universe.”
― Glen Cook, The Dragon Never Sleeps

“The night's real hero is Regina. Guided by hands that knew her and respected her limits, she seemed alive in her element, like a conscious being. She had been through this, and much more, a hundred times and knew exactly what to do. Her every spar, block, bolt is an optimal solution, an age-old answer to the single question it is asked, perfected over time. Together, these parts embody the experience of thousands over centuries. Today I feel bound to them, and in their debt, for the courage and craft that even in death give service.”
― Harvey Oxenhorn, Tuning the Rig: A Journey to the Arctic

“Viewed from above, on the mainmast shroud, they seemed suddenly so small, this little circle, making music, clustered on a floating stage, with the ocean darkening all around and the land behind dissolving into memory. Most of the faces of the people below were in shadow, individual features fading, chins and hair and noses lit by the red glimmer like heads around a hearth.”
― Harvey Oxenhorn, Tuning the Rig: A Journey to the Arctic

“Harmony, like a following breeze
at sea, is the exception.”
― Harvey Oxenhorn, Tuning the Rig: A Journey to the Arctic

“Again there was silence. It was broken by the high trill of the telephone-bell. "There is one of our bacilli squeaking for help," said he with a grim smile. "They are beginning to realise that their continued existence is not really one of the necessities of the universe.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt

“For some reason altogether beyond our conception - and man may have been a mere accident, a by-product evolved in the process. It is as if the scum upon the surface of the ocean imagined that the ocean was created in order to produce and sustain it or a mouse in a cathedral thought that the building was its own proper ordained residence.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“There were things Thor did when something went wrong. The first thing he did was ask himself if what had happened was Loki’s fault. Thor pondered. He did not believe that even Loki would have dared to steal his hammer. So he did the next thing he did when something went wrong, and he went to ask Loki for advice.”
― Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

“Because,” said Thor, “when something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki’s fault. It saves a lot of time.”
― Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

“Here is the last thing, and a shameful admission it is. When the all-father in eagle form had almost reached the vats, with Suttung immediately behind him, Odin blew some of the mead out of his behind, a splatter wet fart of foul-smelling mead right in Suttung's face, blinding the giant and throwing him off Odin's trail.

No one, then or now, wanted to drink the mead that came out of Odin's ass. But whenever you hear bad poets declaiming their bad poetry, filled with foolish similes and ugly rhymes, you will know which of the meads the have tasted.”
― Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

“Oh", said Thor. She won't like that. Well, you can tell her the news. You're better at persuading people to do things than I am when I'm not holding my hammer.”
― Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell