Zach > Zach's Quotes

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Where there's life there's hope.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
― Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."

[Letter to Joan Lancaster, 26 June 1956]”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”
― George Saunders

“Sometimes life feels a certain way that we call “absurd”: nothing matters, all efforts are for naught, everything seems random and perverse, positive intention is perpetually thwarted. This stance communicates darkness and edginess, which can feel like wisdom. But we don’t live as if life is absurd; we live as if it has meaning and makes sense. We live (or try to) by kindness, loyalty, friendship, aspiration to improvement, believing the best of other people. We assume causality and continuity of logic. And we find, through living, that our actions do matter, very much. We can be a good parent or a bad parent, we can drive safely or like a maniac. Our minds can feel clean and positive and clear or polluted and negative. To have an ambition and pursue it feels healthy. A life without earnest striving is a nightmare. (When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.)”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“They say a person has so unique a set of meanings we ought to be incapable of understanding each other, yet we speak and teach as if by magic.”
― E.J. Koh, The Magical Language of Others

“Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her
grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the
freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he
bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable,
imperishable.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness. Only I did not think it would be so soon. Or that he would precede us. Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond. I mistook him for a solidity, and now must pay. I am not stable and Mary not stable and the very buildings and monuments here not stable and the greater city not stable and the wide world not stable. All alter, are altering, in every instant. (Are you comforted?) No. (It”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo