Milli > Milli's Quotes

“We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Now a guarantee of happiness—that's a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“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

“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

“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.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”
― J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning. ”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“You never know," Jack said speculatively. "There may come a time when savages like William Hamleigh aren't in power; when the laws protect the ordinary people instead of enslaving them; when the king makes peace instead of war. Think of that - a time when towns in England don't need walls!”
― Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

“If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized - as a reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“A fast didn't go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“And why must it always be presumed that a woman's views are based on personal considerations?”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

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

“To shut you eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“I don't know what you mean when you say 'the whole world' or 'generations before him.'I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Behind him,across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“You may lie.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“...how could you describe a hill and snow to someone who had never felt height or wind or that feathery, magical cold?”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Once, back in the time of the memories, everything had a shape and size, the way things still do, but they also had a quality called COLOR.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver