Alex > Alex's Quotes

“We all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“I inhaled books like other people breathe oxygen. I didn't just read for knowledge or pleasure, I read to live.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Well," he said softly, "in this life you're often born one thing and die another. You don't have to accept that what you're given when you come in is all you'll have when you leave.”
― Terry Brooks, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

“Until the possible becomes actual, it is only a distraction. Be mindful of what is, not what might be.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

“Exister dans ce monde, c'était se déchaîner. La vie, c'était la puissance de se déchaîner sans être retenu par aucune morale. Sans être restreint, contrôlé, réprimé. Une force qui débordait, qui se démultipliait, et qui continuait à marquer le rythme.
La vie, c'était une vitesse que personne ne pouvait limiter.”
― Ira Ishida, Ikebukuro West Gate Park III

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that . Shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing...
It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I am called a great swordsman because I invented a lethal style; but who is greater, the creator of a killing form—or the master of the classic form?"

"I'm very flattered that you would consider me a master but really—"

"Not a master. The master.”
― Matthew Stover, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

“This is Obi-Wan Kenobi:
A phenomenal pilot who doesn’t like to fly. A devastating warrior who’d rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

“Contemplation of death brought only one slight sting of regret, and more than a bit of puzzlement. Until this very moment, he had never realized he’d always expected, for no discernible reason— That when he died, Anakin would be with him.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“J'ai l'impression de me trouver là par erreur. Ça a toujours été comme ça. Déjà quand j'étais étudiante ou lycéenne, et déjà bien plus tôt à l'école primaire, j'avais toujours ce sentiment.”
― Kaori Ekuni, 神様のボート [Kamisama no bōto]

“De la tristesse, un sentiment d'incrédulité plus que des regrets, et en même temps un étrange sang-froid, le sentiment que de toute façon on ne peut plus revenir en arrière et qu'il y n'y a plus qu'à avancer, avancer. Comme si en avançant encore et encore, tout au bout on allait se réveiller, et tout redeviendrait comme avant.”
― Kaori Ekuni, 神様のボート [Kamisama no bōto]

“In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“You don’t have to like your teacher,” she told me one day after I came home spewing complaints. “But that woman’s got the kind of math in her head that you need in yours. Focus on that and ignore the rest.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Be true to yourself"

- Ven Zallow”
― Paul Kemp, Deceived

“Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.

(There is no reality except in action.)”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

“You can never forget the past unless you face up to it.”
― Fan Wu, February Flowers