Catherine Hirsch > Catherine's Quotes

“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

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

“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Sometimes you get tempted to make something wonderful even better but in doing so you lose what was so wonderful to begin with.”
― Polly Horvath, Everything on a Waffle

“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”
― 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. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”
― Anthony Doerr

“The only really interesting things about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart.”
― Polly Horvath, Everything on a Waffle

“There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.”
― Polly Horvath, Everything on a Waffle

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I don't trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that's why they have godfathers.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Michael Corleone understood for the first time why men like his father chose to become thieves and murderers rather than members of the legal society. The poverty and fear and degradation were too awful to be acceptable to any man of spirit.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“You cannot say 'no' to the people you love, not often. That's the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a 'yes'. Or you have to make them say 'no.' You have to take time and trouble.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Revenge is a dish that tastes best when served cold.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Wine is bottled poetry.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“You're making yourself too important. Guilt comes from feeling we're at the center of the universe. We're not.”
― Gloria Whelan, See What I See

“But what doesn’t die is the love we give to others. There is no end to that.”
― Gloria Whelan, Small Acts of Amazing Courage

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“If you lead, we'll be behind you," one House leader said, "but we'll be way behind you.”
― George W. Bush, Decision Points

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“Buddhism suits me 'cuz nobody's in charge. Nobody's decidin' for me if I'm good or bad, goin' to heaven or hell. It's just me workin' on my head, you workin' your head, the friggin' Dalai Lama workin' on his head.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“We’re all born dying, someone had said. What matters is only how we spend the instant we’re given.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus