Adrian > Adrian's Quotes

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?”
― James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”
― Enrique Peñalosa Londoño

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.”
― Michelle Tea

“I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.
”
― Michelle Tea

“Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“I had never before met anyone who owned a telephone and believed in dragons.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“We aren’t here to be sophisticated. We’re here to fuck people up.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“But the world I wanted wasn't the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever.”
― Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver

“And more to the point, I was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to try and devour my soul. My expectations for a husband had lowered.”
― Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“The things that make us happy make us wise. ”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“The trick to doing something stupid is to do it very quickly, before anyone can shout 'wait!”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“None of this happened, Paul," she says. "You and I never existed. There is no Antimemetics Division.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“They all had a thousand good economic and political reasons why they couldn’t stop. I’m not a politician or a businessman; how am I supposed to persuade them about these things. What are we supposed to do; quite likely the world will collapse and disappear under water; but at least that will happen for political and economic reasons we can all understand, at least it will happen with the help of science, technology and public opinion, with human ingenuity of all sorts! Not some cosmic catastrophe but just the same old reasons to do with the struggle for power and money and so on. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
― Karel Čapek, War with the Newts

“So it will go,” Merriman said. “He will have a sweet picture of the Dark to attract him, as men so often do, and beside it he will set all the demands of the Light, which are heavy and always will be.”
― Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising

“The Walker is abroad,” he said again. “And this night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.”
― Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising

“And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“What is the secret of life?’ I asked.
‘I forget,’ said Sandra.
‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found something out about protein.‘
‘Yeah,’ said Sandra, ‘that’s it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“The dead save me from the fucking young.’ ‘No getting away from ’em, sadly,’ muttered Clover. ‘The older you get, the more of ’em there are.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Trouble With Peace

“In war, you seize all the high ground you can.’ He lifted the egg to his lips, looking small between his big finger and thumb. ‘Except the moral kind.’ And he sucked the insides out through the hole. ‘That ain’t worth shit.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Trouble With Peace

“fratolish hiang perpetshki”
― Owain Owain, The Last Day

“When one of the kitchen domestics had begun breaking plates, it had only been on the third breakage that the unit had been retired as unfit for purpose. Given the considerable investment in domestic service that Charles represented, surely he should be allowed to murder three, or even five people before being deemed irreparably unfit for service.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“In my experience, bossy women seldom get themselves murdered. I can't think why not. When you come to think of it, it's rather a pity.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side