Helen > Helen's Quotes

“-’Tell me’, he said, ‘who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one’?

-’A happy one, of course.’

-’Wrong. A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy yo a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred’.

-’But surely, I said, you have to reward him eventually. Otherwise he will stop offering’.

-’Oh, you would be surprised how long he will go on. But yes, in the end, it’s best to give him something. Then he will be happy again. And you can start over.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

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

“It was through this viewer that he got his first reply from Tralfamadore. The reply was written on Earth in huge stones on a plain in what is now England. The ruins of the reply still stand, and are known as Stonehenge. The meaning of Stonehenge in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above, is: "Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease ...”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920s and 1930s when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother's keeper.”
― Hubert H. Humphrey

“Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

“I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. “Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.’ ”]·”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Oh, calamity!”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies