Shaina > Shaina's Quotes

“The great adventure of our lives. What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? and what is 'the end of the world' except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself? I had now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way that made me picture a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately carved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which god made the world before He had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the universe.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“Nothing that is new is ever new twice. While things that are true are still true the next time; truer, in fact, because they have been tested, they have been tasted, and they are always ripe, always ready...”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ships of Earth

“When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ships of Earth

“Which of them, then, was more detestable? The one who was loathsome by nature, or the one who wanted to be loathsome but hadn't enough ambition to excel at it>”
― Orson Scott Card, Earthfall

“Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking.”
― Orson Scott Card, Earthfall

“Her face might be kindly if she would smile. But the frown isn't personal: it's the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Not a hope. I know where I am, and who, and what day it is. These are the tests, and I am sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“When I get out of here, if I'm ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, yet another remove. It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too may parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It's difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold it or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are...
Beyond reproach, I said.
He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“These albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit with some plague.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“We're all tools in somebody's kit. But that doesn't mean we can't make tools out o other people. Or figure our interesting things to use ourselves for.”
― Orson Scott Card, First Meetings in Ender's Universe

“There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, ' Business as usual.' But if they perceive a slight against god, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave nightly, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“If one of the five theories describes our univers, who lives in the other four worlds”
― Edward Witten

“I wonder if it's possible to start a new relationship without hurting someone else. I wonder if it's possible to have happiness without it being at someone else's expense”
― David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy

“My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.”
― David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy

“Sometimes the space between knowing what to do and actually doing it is a very short walk. Other times it is an impossible expanse.”
― David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy

“I find my greatest strength in wanting to be strong. I find my greatest bravery in deciding to be brave. I don't know if I've ever realized it before,[...] I think we both realize it now. If there's no feeling of fear, then there's no need for courage.”
― David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy

“He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.”
― Paul Auster, City of Glass

“It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby