Petrina > Petrina's Quotes

“She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for...

They don't find it," I answered.

And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."

Of course," I answered.

And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima”—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”
― Carl Sagan

“...An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand...”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
”
― Jonathan Lethem

“Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. ”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“On Undecided Voter​s: "To put them in perspective, I think​ of being​ on an airplane.​ The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle​ with her food cart and, eventually,​ parks​ it beside my seat.​ “Can I inter​est you in the chick​en?​” she asks.​ “Or would​ you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broke​n glass​ in it?”

To be undecided in this elect​ion is to pause​ for a moment and then ask how the chick​en is cooked.”
― David Sedaris

“Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it's not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", here's an update for you. Nowadays 80% of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it's not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!”
― Frank Kaiser

“I’m willing to die for the woman I love. I just want to take 75 years to do it.”
― Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”
― Salvador Dali

“I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

From the back pages”
― Bob Dylan

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping