Nicolas Pratt > Nicolas's Quotes

“How do you spell 'love'?" - Piglet
"You don't spell it...you feel it." - Pooh”
― A.A. Milne

“Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”
― Peter Jackson

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.”
― Stephen King, Insomnia

“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands”
― Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems

“It's always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies

“The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac’s meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Did you know that you could sit in front of a screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn’t last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it’s awesome. It’s everything.”
― Stephen King, Billy Summers

“He told himself, too, that it was good to sleep in a bed you know well after a long day rife with emotions.”
― Michel Plessix, The Wind in the Willows

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them--and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“You can't see the future coming--not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I sometimes think that 'friend' is just a word I use for all the people I haven't murdered yet.”
― Scott Lynch, Rogues

“Books should broaden us, take us to places we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.”
― George R.R. Martin, Rogues

“Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.”
― Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

“Technology is making borders irrelevant. The governments who still value their borders refuse to understand this basic fact.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Cobweb: A Novel

“Europeans—who generally like to think of themselves as being a pretty savvy lot—managed to forget and then rediscover this fact about vitamin C at least seven more times over the next five hundred years, including rediscoveries in 1593 CE, 1614 CE, 1707 CE, 1734 CE, 1747 CE, and 1794 CE, until the idea finally stuck in 1907.”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.*”
― Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

“Empathetic silence is one of the most underused weapons in the world.”
― George R.R. Martin, Rogues

“The end doesn't always justify the means. But sometimes it does. Wisdom is knowing the difference.”
― Neal Shusterman, Thunderhead