H.D. > H.D.'s Quotes

“If we’re very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World

“Life is never that clean," he assures her. "Neither is magic.”
― Matt Wallace, Envy of Angels

“I know death well enough to hear it gather its breath.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“I wish there was some way I could control the variables, but if the time in the darkness taught me anything, it's that the world is larger than my grasp.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It's a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it's also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.”
― Kerry Kletter, The First Time She Drowned

“My heart was so full, I thought it might explode into the ether, creating some bizarre new solar system whose inhabitants ate only love, drank only hope, and breathed only joy. What a substantial galaxy that would be.”
― David Arnold, Kids of Appetite

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

“When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

“For the most part, you don't hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.”
― Patti Smith

“No horse jokes," he said.
"My lord, I apologize for the horse joke. If you put down the book---unharmed!---I will give you a carrot."
He brandished the book at her. "Was that a horse joke?"
"Neigh."
"Was that a horse joke?”
― Cynthia Hand, My Lady Jane

“The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy—anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding—and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don’t even remember making; they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, "Yes.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.”
― Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life

“Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn’t matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“The city shined in the sunlight like a bunch of metallic boobs. What? I'm not a poet. They look like boobs.”
― Andy Weir, Artemis

“Jeff felt it flow through him, the electric freshness of the once more unpredictable world out there.”
― Ken Grimwood, Replay

“The name explains the structure: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bond into a ring-shaped structure called a cresol (also found in creosote), and phosphorus hangs on to the ring like an exhausted swimmer gripping a life preserver.”
― Deborah Blum, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Her skill was the force that pulled them. There were just so few cryptologists of her ability, or William’s. They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns rotating around each other, drawing lesser bodies by their light.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“For all the harmless innocence conjured by the word "library", the Friedmans knew the truth: a library, properly maintained, could save the world - or burn it down.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

“I have seen God and he is this girl.”
― Peter Hedges, What's Eating Gilbert Grape

“I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. As you'll see, it's not a fair fight.”
― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

“It never got easier, mourning someone who was still alive.”
― Kerry Kletter, East Coast Girls

“I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“And I know the past isn't a mirror image of the future, but it's a reflection of what can be; and when your first love breaks your heart, the shards of that can draw blood for a long, long time.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High