Quincy > Quincy's Quotes

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
― Raymond Carver

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories

“Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

“The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“You should know the difference between secrets and lies.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“I told you to hide your heart once. You should have listened.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories

“Anyone can betray anyone.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“No one is born evil, just like no one is born alone. They become that way, through choice and circumstance.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword

“The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“Anyone, anything, can betray anyone. Even your own heart.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword

“Those who know what it's like in the dark will do anything to stay in the light.”
― Victoria Aveyard, King's Cage

“No heart can ever be truly understood. Not even your own.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword

“There are worse lives to live. Don't feel sorry for me.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”
― Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

“Soul meets soul on lovers lips.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: "All human beings by nature desire to know.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“There is a classic psychology experiment that seems to confirm Brewer's point. Children who enjoy drawing were given marker pens and allowed to go at it. Some were rewarded for drawing (they were given a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon, and told ahead of time about this arrangement, whereas for others the issue of rewards was never raised. Weeks later, those who had been rewarded took less interest in drawing, and their drawings were judged to be lower in quality, whereas those who had not been rewarded continued to enjoy the activity and produced higher-quality drawings. The hypothesis is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it. That is, an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“Think of the corporate manager who gets two hundred emails per day and spends his time responding pell-mell to an incoherent press of demands. The way we experience this, often, is as a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly. Yet this same person may find himself checking his email frequently once he gets home or while on vacation. It becomes effortful for him to be fully present while giving his children a bath or taking a meal with his spouse. Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

“The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“No more let life divide what death can join together.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais