Rin > Rin's Quotes

“People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we
imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“You have to be careful who you meet. You can’t unmeet them.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“The way I see it, ignoring things is important.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“Forget him. Forget him.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“He tousled Baby's hair, then looked up at Tiger Lily. "The woods have rules." He put Baby down gingerly in his trough with his bottle. "But the rules are ugly."
"It's nature," she said, thoughtfully.
"I have a lot of disagreements with nature," he said, looking confused, and his downy brow wrinkled over his eyes.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“Somehow as children he and Tiger Lily had been shuttled together - both misfits or, as I liked to think of them, strange exotic birds, one too fierce to be hemmed in as a girl, and the other too hesitant to be respected as a boy.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“Tiger Lily, you're a fool." he said, and kissed her forehead. And despite his size, and the fact that a boy like him was not built to shoulder much of anything, he shouldered her weight, and carried her home.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“She hated his need to always win and he hated her coldness during their arguments.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
― Blaise Pascal

“She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are:
Where have you been all my life? they ask.
Where have I been all my life? she replies.”
― Margaret Atwood, Good Bones and Simple Murders

“A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs―the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate―the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are:
Where have you been all my life? they ask. Where have I been all my life? she replies.
We know! We know! And we know wolfishness when we see it!
Look out, we shout at her silently, thinking of all the smart things we would do in her place.
But trapped inside the white pages, she can’t hear us,
and goes prancing and warbling and lolloping innocently towards her doom.
(Innocence! Perhaps that’s the key to stupidity,
we tell ourselves, who think we gave it up long ago.)
If she escapes from anything, it’s by sheer luck, or else the hero:
this girl couldn’t tear her way out of a paper bag.”
― Margaret Atwood, Good Bones and Simple Murders

“When will it all cave in? The sky, I mean; our networks; our intricate pretensions. We were too good at what we did, at being fruitful, at multiplying, and now there’s too much breathing. We eat dangerous foods, our shit glows in the dark, the cells of our bodies turn on us like sharks. Every system is self-limiting. Will we solve ourselves as the rats do? With war, with plagues, with mass starvation? These thoughts come with breakfast, like the juice from murdered fruits. Your depression, my friend, is the revenge of the oranges.”
― Margaret Atwood, Good Bones and Simple Murders

“But we still find the world astounding, we can’t get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
Better than the mouth, my darling. Better than the mouth.”
― Margaret Atwood, Good Bones and Simple Murders

“Sometimes I can't see myself when I'm with you. I can only just see you.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“This is the underside of my world.

Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job, and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man