Invader Xan > Invader Xan's Quotes

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“One does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“There is no faster way to harden my determination than to assume I will fail at something.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“It was quite a shock for me to discover that crime was so easy that it was boring. I reluctantly turned to scholarship.”
― Barry Hughart

“I'm so close to Schiaparelli I can taste it. I guess it would taste like sand, mostly, but that's not the point.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“My life is now a desperate struggle for survival…with occasional titration.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“You may think you see plenty of stars, friend reader, but you are wrong. Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick's.”
― Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

“So it has been, again and again throughout my life, as I form connections with people and then lose them to distance and time. I mourn those losses, even when I know my erstwhile friends are safe and happy among their own kin.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“They say there are no atheists in war; I tell you that pantheists abound at the edge of a cliff. I would have taken the blessing of any god I could get.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“I would choose the heat above an equal degree of chill. The evidence of natural history points to a tropical origin for our species, and I believe it to be true.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“He was a man who did not properly exist in any single world, but he seemed to have found a place between them, and that, more than his past, was who he was.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“Nudity, I find, rapidly becomes boring when it is not treated as scandalous.”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“I therefore had only enough fear to make myself terrified — not enough to turn back”
― Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents

“I believe that every human has a finite amount of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.”
― Neil Armstrong

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
― Neil Armstrong

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.”
― Neil Armstrong

“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.”
― Neil Armstrong

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg.
Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter… Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.
It matters that you don't just give up.”
― Stephen Hawking