Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“What she thinks is: this could have been me. Why not? A real girl, in a real house, with a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and an aunt and an uncle and a nephew and a niece and a cousin and all those other words for the map of people who love each other and stay together. The map called family.

Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.

But you have to open it to find that out.”
― M.R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts

“In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea
into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“The light works," he said, indicating the window, "the gravity works," he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. "Anything else we have to take our chances with.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I don't fall in love very easily. It takes a long time, and then, when I have fallen in love, I'm still not sure. I'm suspicious of myself. What if tomorrow I don't feel the same? I have to wait, to be sure. And I wait and wait.”
― Joey Comeau, We all got it coming

“I feel the way bank robbers must feel before they go out on that last job that ends up getting them all killed. That is to say, optimistic.”
― Joey Comeau, Lockpick Pornography

“Halfway through the televised debate I kick my boot into the screen. Even on mute I can't stand it. It feels good to smash the TV, though. I feel like I'm participating in the political system.”
― Joey Comeau, Lockpick Pornography

“When the end comes, I hope it’s as strange as that. I hope that the sky tears open and the world is washed with colors that we’ve never seen before.”
― Joey Comeau, Lockpick Pornography

“Kissing girls is easy, like breaking windows.”
― Joey Comeau, One Bloody Thing After Another

“In the end it never works out. You are who you are, no matter what you pretend at the beginning. So I’m not pretending. I drink to ignore my problems. I spend more time with my computer than with my friends. I am angry and lonely, but I can wash dishes just fine. I’m being honest. Please don’t be an asshole about this.”
― Joey Comeau, Overqualifieder

“I'm going up to my room now, where I may die.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“A heart's a heavy burden.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“She hadn't chosen him over all the others. The truth was that she hadn't even thought about anyone else.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“Twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“He opened his mouth to reply that feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build for himself, but he didn't say anything.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“She remembered lying in the crevasse, buried by snow. She thought of that perfect silence. Also now, like then, no one knew where she was. This time too, no one would come. But she no longer expected them to.
She smiled at the clear sky. With a little effort, she could get up by herself.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“Separating them were two layers of brick, a few inches of plaster, and nine years of silence.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“Denis's love for Mattia had burned itself out, like a forgotten candle in an empty room, leaving behind a ravenous discontent.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“If you’re a salesman, you have to deal with yourself the way you are. Not how you’d like to be.

If you don’t have what it takes, you can waste a lot of time asking yourself “How can I get what it takes?” The question you should be asking yourself is, “Is there something else that takes what I have to offer?” Because if there’s something you can succeed at, just the way you are, you won’t have to waste a lot of time trying to change yourself. Which you’re never going to be able to do, anyway.”
― Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

“Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too. ”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we'd never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I'll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and I love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“They say that when you’re really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“It's one thing for forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then?”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs