Isa > Isa's Quotes

“I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Observation had always meant more to me than interaction...My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become part of them with ease.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Here is the grand sweep of civilization’s paw, stretched against the black between the stars, a comfort to every ship’s captain when she looks out into the void and hopes not to see anything looking back. Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“The loneliness became more and more unbearable. I ached to be touched. I feared I was disappearing and I'd cease to exist if someone didn't touch me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“What can you do when your five senses are not enough?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Who was I now—woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not so, when I've done everything as it should be done?”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“But if we have learned nothing else, we have learned this: humans can walk away from, and forget, anything. Civilization can go back to 'normal' after anything.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“If something can cross over from conceptual space into reality, taking physical form, then something can cross in the opposite direction. It must be possible to take a physical entity, mechanically extract the idea which it embodies, amplify that idea and broadcast it up into conceptual space. A bigger idea. A better idea, one designed specifically to fight SCP-3125. An ideal. A movement. A hero.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock.

"How?"

"With better ideas.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery - as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.”
― Frank Herbert

“I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“You came into my life-not as one comes to visit (you know, “not taking one’s hat off”) but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera