Nik > Nik's Quotes

“He didn't use the Jihad, the Jihad used him. I think he would have stopped it by now if he could. You can't stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It's overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad’dib hasn't the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there?”
― Frank Herbert

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?”
― Virginia Woolfová, To the Lighthouse

“To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said.”
― Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

“The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse