MacKenzie Russell > MacKenzie's Quotes

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
― Marybeth Mayhew Whalen, When We Were Worthy

“The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measured in meaning.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“I imagine he knows magic, if he is reading books. The book itself doesn’t matter. It’s that he found another world in it.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“You can tell me anything, her eyes say, because I will see the beauty in everything you say.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them. I know there are some who would disagree - those who think ideas are like food they can taste and spit out if they don't like it. But ideas are stronger than that. You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won't leave. Until you do something about it.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning.

It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.”
― Carrie Fisher

“The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“There are many ways in which the "check brain" light illuminates, but here's the screwed-up part: the driver can't see it. It's like the light is positioned in the backseat cup holder, beneath an empty can of soda that's been there for a month. No one sees it but the passengers—and only if they're really looking for it, or when the light gets so bright and so hot that it melts the can, and sets the whole car on fire.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“I’m evolving, is the thing; I’m a god becoming a constellation.’
‘The constellations are mostly demigods,’ I point out. ‘And they didn’t get to be constellations until after they died.’
He laughs at that, and says, ‘Death is a small sacrifice to become immortal.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“We are, however, creatures of containment. We want all things in life packed into boxes that we can label. But just because we have the ability to label it, doesn't mean we really know what's in the box.

It's kind of religion. It gives us comfort to believe we have defined something that is, by its very nature, indefinable. As to whether or not we've gotten it right, well, it's all a matter of faith.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because “what could have been” is much more highly regarded than “what should have been.” Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant... is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times... Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”
― Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.”
― C.S. Lewis

“My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.”
― George Santayana, Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies

“What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death.”
― Frida Kahlo

“You've a right to believe that we're governed by Nature and the hidden Force within her. You can think that the gods, including my Melitele, are merely a personification of this power invented for simpletons so they can understand it better, accept its existence. According to you, that power is blind. But for me, Geralt, faith allows you to expect what my goddess personifies from nature: order, law, goodness. And hope.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“I was just a moment, and you gave me a million Junes.
I was just a moment, and you made me forever.”
― Emily Henry, A Million Junes

“I promise you. I promise you the stars. I promise you the lake and falls, coywolves and robins. I promise earth and heaven: I will love you long after the last human has taken his last breath. When the stars burn out and the oceans freeze over and the whole world is ash and dust and ice, our names will still be carved into this tree of life, side by side, and I'll still be loving you.”
― Emily Henry, A Million Junes

“I was just a moment, and you made me forever.”
― Emily Henry, A Million Junes