Dan Joseph Matusicky > Dan's Quotes

“Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King

“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.”
― Isaac Asimov, Nightfall

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“I don't want to die without any scars.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Be proud of your pain, for you are stronger than those with none.”
― Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

“Real courage is 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

“Write. Don't think. Relax.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren't all that different.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
― Stephen King , The Stand

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“This is all disillusioning, Beenay. I thought it was only us psychologists who made the data fit the theories and called the result 'science.' Seems more like something the Apostles of Flame might do!”
― Isaac Asimov, Nightfall

“In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.”
― Isaac Asimov, Nightfall One

“It gets in your blood, like you got salt water running through you. The fishermen Danny knows love the sea and hate it, say it’s like a cruel woman who hurts you over and over again but you keep going back to her anyway.”
― Don Winslow, City on Fire

“Lesson: Don’t hold on to something’s going to pull you into a trap. If you’re going to let go, let go early. Better yet, don’t take the bait at all.”
― Don Winslow, City on Fire

“Danny’s like his old man,” Pasco says. “Stubborn. You heard about Irish Alzheimer’s? They forget everything but the grudges.”
― Don Winslow, City on Fire

“The nuns used to say that the devil comes disguised as an angel. That the worst things you’ll do, you’ll do for the best reasons. The most hateful things you’ll do, you’ll do for the ones you love most.”
― Don Winslow, City on Fire

“This is a one-time thing,” Danny says. “Your soul is never a rental,” Bernie says. “It’s always a sale.”
― Don Winslow, City on Fire

“Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“For me, a good story is all about setting up expectations and delivering on them in an exciting and surprising way.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“It makes one realize that the physicality of our world is a boundary to us only if our will is weak; a true champion can accomplish things that a normal person would think impossible.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“People, like dogs, love repetition. Chasing a ball, lapping a course in a race car, sliding down a slide. Because as much as each incident is similar, so it is different.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Here’s why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another’s conversations constantly. It’s like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles—preferably of his own making—in order to triumph. A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which, after all, is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to. When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain