Cara > Cara's Quotes

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“When you walk past a bookshop you haven't visited before, you have to go in and look around. That's the family rule.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“It's okay to bribe people with books, right?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Il y a deux réponses à cette question, comme à toutes les questions : celle du poète et celle du savant. Laquelle veux-tu en premier ?”
― Pierre Bottero, Ellana

“What is deadlier than hate, and flows without limit?

Indifference.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“You know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“I only steal because my dear old family needs the money to live!"
Locke Lamora made this proclamation with his wine glass held high; he and the other Gentleman Bastards were seated at the old witchwood table. . . . The others began to jeer.
"Liar!" they chorused
"I only steal because this wicked world won't let me work an honest trade!" Calo cried, hoisting his own glass.
"LIAR!"
"I only steal," said Jean, "because I've temporarily fallen in with bad company."
"LIAR!"
At last the ritual came to Bug; the boy raised his glass a bit shakily and yelled, "I only steal because it's heaps of fucking fun!"
"BASTARD!”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“I can't wait to have words with the Gray King when this shit is all finished," Locke whispered. "There's a few things I want to ask him. Philosophical questions. Like, 'How does it feel to be dangled out a window by a rope tied around your balls, motherfucker?”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“So that makes us robbers of robbers," said Bug, "who pretend to be robbers working for a robber of other robbers.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.”
― Anne Bronte

“So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that --I didn't let it-- and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I know your brother’s past. And I know that he can still find happiness even in the darkest of circumstances, because his faith sustains him. What sustains you?”
“The blood of my enemies.”
― Kiersten White, Bright We Burn

“Lada had always known exactly what shape she would take. She had never let it be determined by the people around her. But Radu could not escape the need for love, the need for people in his life to help him see what he should—and could—be. Lada shaped herself in spite of her environment. Radu shaped himself because of it.”
― Kiersten White, Bright We Burn

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Do not confuse guilt with conviction. Guilt is self-centered, and leads only to destructive obsession. But conviction brings balance—a sense of purpose beyond oneself.”
― Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor

“We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too.”
― Amy Harmon, What the Wind Knows

“Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.
Not anymore, though.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles