Brittany Nailon > Brittany's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.”
― Marvin Bell

“I want her to melt into me, like butter on toast. I want to absorb her and walk around for the rest of my days with her encased in my skin.

I want.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm--you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“Age is a terrible thief. Just when you're getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother's love, a father's love, a lover's love, a friend's love, an enemy's love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-pushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an anatomy textbook, drawing pictures of things we can only ever see in fractions. With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten; love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time, love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic proportions, one love is overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds. It's an unreadable mess.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalistic as a Big Mac. It's not important that it's real. It's only important that it's tasty.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“Without memories we wouldn't know who we are, how we once were, who we'd like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories.”
― Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

“Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind.”
― Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

“I had fallen for the primal allure of a non living entity with the diametrically opposed powers of creation and destruction on a scale beyond the scope of human influence”
― Jess Phoenix, Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The truth frightens people because it isn't stable. It shifts every day.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things

“Eddie had come to understand that what a man saw and what actually existed in the natural world often were contradictory. The human eye was not capable of true sight, for it was constrained by its own humanness, clouded by regret, and opinion, and faith. Whatever was witnessed in the real world was unknowable in real time. It was the eye of the camera that captured the world as it truly was.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things

“After all, the trouble with what the scientists said was that they were always saying something different. This year one idea, next year something else. Scientific opinion was ever changing, like the fashions of women’s dress, while the firm and fixed date 4004 BC invited the attention of those seeking greater verity.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“We are finding wonderful dinosaurs!’ Exulted Cope. ‘Wonderful, marvelous dinosaurs”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“And Sternberg had been right: in the end, the worst thing about the badlands was the dust. Harshly alkaline, it billowed up with every stab of pick and shovel; it burned the eyes, stung the nose, caked the mouth, caused coughing spasms; it burned in open cuts; it covered clothes and chafed at elbows and armpits and backs of knees; it gritted in sleeping bags; it dusted food, sour and bitter, and flavored coffee; stirred by the wind, it became a constant force, a signature of this harsh and forbidding place.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth: A Novel

“A person is laid bare in the badlands. Eons of erosion carve the world down into its basic element: dust. There is no hiding here, even from ourselves.”
― Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

“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 conservation, 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, 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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I now walk into the wild.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.”
― Wallace Stegner