MAYA QUARTZ > MAYA's Quotes

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald's hash brown if it's all they've got.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.”
― Alice Walker, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“Delight seems insubstantial. Happiness feels more grounded. Ecstasy is what I shoot for. Satisfaction is the hardest to obtain.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
― Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

“Stealing from one author is plagiarism; from many authors, research.”
― Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books

“Life is too precious to be left to chance”
― Walter Moers, The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

“Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes - they'd sooner eat the same things all the time - but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes.”
― Walter Moers

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“When a person who works retail has a day off we don't do nothing for nobody unless you ask nice.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“Hearing ain’t the same as listening.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, The Black God's Drums

“Hard not to admire a woman who’s not afraid to let out a good snort.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, The Black God's Drums

“Mosscap considered. “Because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful,” it said.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“DOGS ARE THE WORST. THEY’LL SELL YOU OUT FOR A TREAT AND A HEAD PAT.”
― John Scalzi, Starter Villain

“Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.”
― Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When they heard that someone was full figured and liked cooking & eating, most men imagined someone who was quiet and domestic; someone whose interior life would not surpass their own. But did that reasoning really hold up? Eating was fundamentally an individual and egoistic compulsion... a gourmand was ultimately a seeker of the truth. You could wrap up their mission in all kinds of fancy language, but it was simply confronting their desires day in and day out. As you learn to cook, you become increasingly able to shut out the outside world and create a fortress within your own spirit. You hunted down your prey using fire and blade to fashion them down into the form you desired... it takes a deathly earnestness to remain faithful to your desires at all times.”
― Asako Yuzuki

“When a man dies from a bullet entering his chest, it's a homicide.
When a man dies from a meteorite landing on his head, it's a tragedy.
Don't use bullets. Use meteorites
Don't commit a homicide. Commit a Tragedy.
-Guy McMaster”
― Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer

“I am offended you consider me a kidnapper. I like to think it was more of an enthusiastic recruitment.”
― T.J. Klune, In the Lives of Puppets

“Here was the other option: the tranquilizing chair. It was always waiting for her. It always wanted her back. It always wanted her to quit again, to sit down and never get back up.

In the end, Amy thought, everything always comes down to those two choices: stay down or stand up.”
― Grady Hendrix, Horrorstör

“I was beginning to learn the gendered rules for behavior. My parents did not want a steely-eyed warrior for a daughter- they wanted someone obedient and kind. She didn't have to be a quivering sack of hysteria, but she should at least crack at FBI-interrogator levels. I would have to do better. I would try to be softer.”
― Heather Gay, Bad Mormon: A Memoir

“The arrogance of writing comes not from the finished creation, but from the very act itself. What hubris is required for a single mind to believe that its thoughts should populate the world? What unbridled arrogance is it to disperse ideas like the petals of a dandelion in the wind, allowing them to float free, to germinate in the minds of others like an invasive weed?”
― Alec Hutson, The Crimson Queen

“This is exactly what I wanted to see today. Everyone thinks the food other people eat is disgusting, and that's the way it should be... How about a toast? To all our uniquely disgusting foods!”
― Sayaka Murata, Life Ceremony

“I cannot stress enough how good it is to know the future. If I didn’t come back with my memories intact, I would have probably clung to my father. I would have hated to see myself, unlovable, begging for attention, and finally turning into an ugly woman all over again. Yes, to live a good life… I just need to do nothing. The moment I tried to do something, I would attract people’s hatred and anger.”
― Ramgeul Geul, 폭군님은 착하게 살고 싶어 [Poggunnim'eun Chaghage Salgo Sip'eo]

“People were so oversensitive to the supposed overfishing of sharks. As if it wasn't the height of hubris to decide that humanity needed to be put into the position of custodian to the height of apex predators. God had made man to fight and defeat his other creations. Why else would he have made his chosen children physically weak, but mentally strong? In the battle between man and shark, the shark should always have won. That it didn't, proved only that man was intended to be victorious and that he should be allowed to kill whatever he could before he, in turn, was killed.”
― Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep

“To be conscious in eternal night, you would pray for oblivion... But there would be no one around to hear you.”
― Michelle Paver, Dark Matter