Michael Ferro > Michael's Quotes

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
― Mark Twain

“This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“There are two races on earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace.”
― Guy de Maupassant, 88 Short Stories

“Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave, and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.”
― Alice Childress

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
― David Abrams, Fobbit: A Novel

“Sometimes it’s worth lingering on the journey for a while before getting to the destination."

Metaphors. This was the cost of making out with an artist.”
― Richelle Mead, The Indigo Spell

“Silence is sometimes the best answer”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Imagine if you will—and you will—a mushroom cloud bigger than anything that you currently see out that window. Imagine jet planes and bombers the size of apartment complexes dropping technological marvels of deconstruction upon this city, this world, all around the epicenter of a blooming death cloud. Imagine that mushroom coming to a head, knowing that it is filled with unimaginable heat and concrete, dust, papers—human faces, eyes, and brains. Gray matter filling the radioactive cloud with electricity as all that is inside us leaves us and becomes one with the mushroom. Glass will melt and connect with steel, and we will melt and connect with each other as everything that made us whole is criminally dissected and rearranged. Everything below us, from the sewer tunnels to the subway line, will be consumed into the cloud and jettisoned into the stratosphere, where it will become nothing but silken ash, hardened to a black substance, and turned back to a black dust, transfixed into a black nothing. A stinking, glowing crater all that remains of where you had your first kiss and told someone that you loved them. A mess of a world where everything you’ve ever done quickly becomes all that you’ll ever do.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“Heald smiled back at her and avoided looking into her eyes for a moment, but was drawn back into them almost immediately. They were a pale brown with hints of faint green and light blue; they had always reminded him of the colors of the earth— thousands of miles in two tiny spheres. But now they were faded and graying, like a light morning fog.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“He was acutely aware then that he was closer to his future than he was with the memories of his past.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“This was when the aging smokestacks atop the monumental factories began to shut off one by one. There were still plenty left running to keep the air over Detroit filled with that choking industrial aptitude, but you were never far from a hollowed-out factory, massive steel tubes on the roofs pointing up toward the sky with nothing left inside but dust and cobwebs. These giant pillars of concrete and metal now jutted high like extended index fingers from broken and casted hands, pointing toward something they would never touch.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“You know, your grandmother once told me something that the Native Americans say about dogs with different-colored eyes: they are extraordinary, for they have the ability to look upon both heaven and hell.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“Heald did not understand cats. All his life he had been a dog person, naturally averse to cats due to his allergies. Many of the women that he knew in the city had cats. It couldn’t be as simple as men being “dog people” and women being “cat people”; he knew that was too one- dimensional. Maybe something about cats’ apprehensive and complicated nature drew women to adore them, sensing a mirrored personality that had to be appreciated, or at the very least, respected. Dogs, with their fanatical, uncomplicated, and singular devotion, were everything a man could ever ask for.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“A dog only got hurt if its love was repudiated, intentional or not, though it never had long to feel true sorrow in response because it never held its love back, regardless of reciprocation; the dog just tried to love you more. No other distractions such as work, home, friendships, or lovers—just the insistence of undying and unwavering affection in the truest sense of the word—asking for only a fraction of what it gave.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“Heald envied and admired a dog's existence, and it only weighed on him more when he considered the rare and undeniably questionable gift of knowing that he would die— that he was mortal. A dog could only embrace love absolutely, without hesitation, and could devote itself to it with complete and unabashed abandon, for the world was forever.”
― Michael A. Ferro, TITLE 13: A Novel

“Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Mistakes are a part of being human. Precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.”
― Al Franken

“WHAT DO WE WANT?! PATIENCE! WHEN DO WE WANT IT?! NOW!”
― Al Franken

“When telling a story, I feel like it is important to try to crack the surface of our insular American experience in as many places as possible, then pour my characters into those seams like an epoxy.”
― Michael A. Ferro

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“You're beautiful, but you're empty. No one could die for you.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Typical! I break my neck trying to get here, and I find you peacefully tidying up!”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“Why are some things easier to write than say?”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice