Monika > Monika's Quotes

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“The best lies about me are the ones I told.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.”
― Anne Enright, The Green Road

“Because wars you can do, and famines you can do and floods are relatively easy, but no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands.”
― Anne Enright, The Green Road

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Fear cuts deeper than swords.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“It's the good things that hurt when you're missing them.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“All this happened, more or less.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“You know so little of war. Battles may be fought from the outside in, but wars are won from the inside out.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness. It is also not an epic monolith that has plagued me since boyhood, as might be expected. Rather, it is simply the tale of how two people can be important to each other their whole lives, and then, one morning, quite without meaning to, one of them wakes to find that importance has been magnified into a sudden and intense desire to put his tongue in the other's mouth.
A long, slow slide, then a sudden impact.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“I have lived most of my life as a devotee of the philosophy that a man should not see two sevens in one day,”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Why do we all say we prefer honesty but rarely give that courtesy to others?”
― Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance: An Investigation