Zemmiphobe > Zemmiphobe's Quotes

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Divinities are like that, you see - they really only have the power we grant them.”
― Jay Kristoff, Darkdawn

“man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

“I’m scared of everything. And I’m crazy. Like maybe you think I’m a little crazy, but I only ever let people see the tip of my crazy iceberg. Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and socially inept, I’m a complete disaster.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Goodness is not kindness, and there is nothing crueler than virtue.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire

“Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it—wouldn’t be the last either, though I didn’t know that then—but it was the first time I’d said it aloud, to anyone. It’s a strange thing, to want to die. Stranger still when you don’t feel you deserve to get away so easily.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.”
― Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“Anyone who thinks one book has all the answers hasn't read enough books.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 6

“You know that old cliché about millions of deaths being a statistic while the loss of just one life is a tragedy? If that's true, what is it when you lose something that never even had the chance to be born? I've had lots of relationships in my time, platonic and otherwise, but the ones I think about most are those that never quite made it to term. The dashing first date who didn't call you back. The lady on the train you had that amazing conversation but never saw again. The cool neighbor kid you met the first time a week before he moved away. I guess I'm just haunted by all that potential energy. One moment, the universe presents you with this amazing opportunity for new possibilities...and then...”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 7

“When a decision like that is made by a government, it emboldens those who are already prejudiced to speak their deepest thoughts of hate. They assume they are simply brave enough to say what everyone really thinks.”
― Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows

“Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.”
― Ann Patchett

“I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Elend: I kind of lost track of time…
Breeze: For two hours?
Elend: There were books involved.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“Do you ever not go for the lowest blow? Like, do you ever think, 'Maybe I shouldn't say the most cruel thing just now?'"
"I'm trying to be efficient.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“That breaks my heart, to think that you can't remember a world without the Humdrum. I worry that your generation will just acclimate to it. That you won't see the necessity of fighting back.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“Why should I, why should anyone, expect her to go on fighting in this way, torn apart, minute by minute? Although I want her to live, I do not believe I have the right to impose it on her, to demand it.

Struggling to find a response to her cries for help, one which does not deny her pain or collude with it, I say no one who cares about her would ask her to do what is too difficult.”
― Carol Lee, To Die For

“All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“You should try not to talk so much, friend. You'll sound far less stupid that way.

- Breeze”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“The worst type of crying wasn't the kind everyone could see--the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.”
― Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

“Because what is more transfixing than the sound of people hating you?”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“The fewer connections you have to the world, the easier it is to leave.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“i think the idea of a 'mental health day' is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying 'i don't want to deal with things today' and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless we choose to bring a gun to school or ruin the morning announcements with a suicide.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“i wish i were someone else, even though i know i'll never, ever be able to get away from what i've done and what's been done to me.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson