Roumen Guha > Roumen's Quotes

“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

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“I don't mean to hate people, I just get forced into it.”
― Jon Richardson, It's Not Me, It's You

“There is simply too much to be done for us all to go round 'enjoying ourselves.' When the world is perfect, then we can all sit down and eat jelly beans, but for now the fact that things are going well for you just means that you are in a position to alleviate someone else's suffering for a while.”
― Jon Richardson, It's Not Me, It's You

“I refuse to believe that clubbing is how people are supposed to meet to establish relationships on a level for beyond what we consider to be a norm in modern society.”
― Jon Richardson, It's Not Me, It's You

“I know very well that I have no reason to feel aggrieved - I am fully aware of how lucky I am, but knowing it and still being down makes me hate myself all the more.”
― Jon Richardson, It's Not Me, It's You

“Anyone who tells you that it is better to have loved and lost that to never loved at all has never done both.”
― Jon Richardson, It's Not Me, It's You

“I don’t need someone to complete me, I need someone to make things a little bit better every now and again.”
― Jon Richardson

“I believe passionately in love, I even believe in 'the one' to a certain exert, but I am willing to play the waiting game and patiently await their arrival rather than dive into relationships I know not to be right in the mean time.”
― Jon Richardson, It's Not Me, It's You

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”
― Naomi Shulman

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
― John von Neumann

“Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.”
― John von Neumann

“A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so.”
― John von Neumann

“Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol 1

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

“It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.”
― G.H. Hardy

“A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”
― G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

“Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.”
― G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

“Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.”
― G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

“A person’s first duty, a young person’s at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.”
― G. H. Hardy (Author)

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”
― Edmund Burke

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
― Edmund Burke

“Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”
― Edmund Burke

“Our patience will achieve more than our force.”
― Edmund Burke

“Never apologise for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologise for the truth.”
― Edmund Burke