Chris > Chris's Quotes

“Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else's expense, you can't beat it.”
― Iain Sinclair

“The problem with keeping money in a bank is that in the blink of a tiger's eye it will turn on you: what's yours becomes theirs, what was your sweat and labour and sold off portions of a lifetime becomes a stranger's.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

“always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“There’s no way to be sure,” Irene said. “The biggest threat is giving up hope. If he decides there’s no chance to survive, he’ll stop trying.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Know how you can be proud of me all the time? Lower your expectations.”
― Teresa Burrell, The Advocate

“Spending some time alone is a therapy that most of us don’t know how to practice. You need a little time alone every now and then to know what you are made of, to know and to do what you really like and to actually like yourself.”
― Mohamed Ghazi, Honest

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“If you detect a needlessly complex style when you read, look for characters and actions so that you can unravel for yourself the complexity the writer needlessly inflicted on you.”
― Joseph M. Williams

“Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first.”
― Antoni Gaudí

“It's true, I'd never understood whether this vogue for apologising is a sign of humility or of impudence: you do something you shouldn't have done, then you apologise and wash your hands of it. It reminds me of the old joke about a cowboy riding across the prairie who hears a voice from heaven telling him to go to Abilene, then at Abilene the voice tells him to go into the saloon and put all his money on number five. Tempted by the voice, he obeys, number eighteen comes up, and the voice murmur, Too bad, we've lost.”
― Umberto Eco, Numero zero

“Do we really have to talk about professionalism? Everyone here is a professional. A master builder who puts up a wall that hasn't collapsed is certainly acting professionally, but professionalism ought to be the norm, and we should only be talking about the dodgy builder who puts up a wall that doesn't collapse....This insistence on professionalism, that it is something special, makes it sound as if people are generally lousy workers.”
― Umberto Eco, Numero zero

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the state (attributed to James Jesus Angleton)”
― Umberto Eco, Numero zero

“Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“There is only one way to learn. It's through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“What we find changes who we become.”
― Peter Morville

“How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Self pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“True, it would not be a new venture for him. But need it be? Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before?”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before? Sitting”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence--one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“The love of old things is a way of respecting time.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“I also hate cyclists posing in sunglasses and all the pro gear, thinking they’re cool when they couldn’t even pedal up the modest slope of Yang-teh Boulevard. You know the type: guy with a bulging gut who parks his expensive bike by the side of the road to show it off. Whenever I see a guy like that, I hope his chain falls off. Or that he gets a flat or a broken spoke.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle