Liz > Liz's Quotes

“Boros's presence reminded me what it's like to live with someone. And how very awkward it is. How much it diverts you from your own thoughts and distracts you. How another Person starts to irritate you without actually doing anything annoying, but simply by being there. Each morning when he went off to the forest, I blessed my glorious solitude. How do people manage to spend decades living together in a small space? I wondered. How can they possibly sleep in the same bed together, breathing on and jostling each other accidentally in their sleep? I'm not saying it hasn't happened to me too. For some time I shared my bed with a Catholic, and nothing good came of it.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“There's nothing I could have done about it then and there's nothing I can do about it now and that's what I have to live with. Maybe that right there is the definition of life. Being alive is learning how to live with the intolerable.”
― Richard Kadrey, Aloha from Hell

“Love is a myth.'
'Love is a myth,' Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.'
'What?'
'In winter,'Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“5.Buggre Alle this for a Larke I amme sick to mye Hart of typefetinge. Master Biltonn if no Gentelmann, and Master Scagges now more that a tighte fisted Southwarke Knobbefticke. I telle you, onne a daye laike thif Ennywone withe half and oz of Sense shoulde bee oute in the Suneshain, ane nott Stucke here alle the lielong dale inn thif mowldey olde By-Our-Lady Workefhoppe *AE@;I*”
― Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.”
― Connie Willis, All Clear

“Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?”
― M.R. Carey, Fellside

“There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“It's ill guessing what the bats are flying after.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for
him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMS
to be done right--though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just
now--and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days
when you might get un-birthday presents--'

Certainly,' said Alice.

And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'

I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't--till I tell
you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.

When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it
means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'

The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many
different things.'

The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master--that's
all.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Laurence reached up to wipe the grime from his face, and finding his hand come away red with gore felt back to where his scalp hung open and wet. "Help me fold it up again," he said. "A head wound is always a bloody nuisance; but unless my brains are out in the air, I suppose it will not kill me.”
― Naomi Novik, Blood of Tyrants

“Death was the only question that contained its own answer, and when you asked the question and had the answer you were gone, you were nothing.”
― Robert Silverberg, At Winter's End

“It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that's going to happen in your life has already happened.

-from "Snow" in The Big Book of Science Fiction”
― John Crowley

“So he left, and found no passion, and returned to nothing at all.”
― J. Robert Lennon, On the Night Plain

“I won't be the first man to spend his life barely alive, he told himself. Men did it. It was no great feat. He would live--he'd live a few scant miles from the heart of life, on its chill periphery. That suited him after all.”
― J. Robert Lennon, On the Night Plain

“He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.”
― Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

“Young men often behave oafishly, but they may mature in time--unless they get an arrow through the neck first.”
― Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

“What is distinctive about the customs surrounding hospitality in [archaic Greek] culture is that elite men who have entered one another's homes and have been entertained appropriately are understood to have created a bond of "guest-friendship" (xenia) between their households that will continue into future generations. ... It is created not by proximity and kinship, but by a set of behaviors that create bonds between people who are geographically distant from each other. Xenia is thus a networking tool that allows for the expansion of Greek power, from the unit of the family to the city-state and then across the Mediterranean world. It is the means by which unrelated elite families can connect to one another as equals, without having to fight for dominance. ... The poem's episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia.”
― Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

“A woman who gets adrift on Broadway without a clear and definite idea of what she wants to buy, is like a ship without a compass,' the American Phrenological Journal warned in 1867.”
― Fran Leadon, Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

“Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That's realism, but everyone whose hopes weren't dashed started off by having hope. Hope's the price of admission.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.”
― Richard Kadrey, Sandman Slim

“Sometimes annoyance will keep you going when booze and fear and hope are as dead as the Big Bopper.”
― Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead

“Clearly, in this world, you were a fool to count on beneficence from above.”
― David Brin, Existence

“What happens next is not to be known, but if we die, we die having chosen our deeds, and that is right and good.”
― Kim Wilkins, Sisters of the Fire