Erica's quotes

(showing 1-29 of 29)

"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

tags: life, pain
636 people liked it

"What do you do in Physics Club?
Well, we talk about physics, and the elements of physics.
See, it's social. Demented and sad, but social.

--The Breakfast Club"
— John Hughes

tags: 80s, angst, brat-pack, humor
10 people liked it

"It's Planet Me, folks. We all live on Planet Me. It's a wonder we all fit."
— Laurie White

tags: blogging, cell-phones, humor, slice-of-life, supermarkets
3 people liked it

"Even ivory towers need central heating."
— Breyten Breytenbach

tags: essay, new-york-times-review, poetry, satire
1 person liked it

"God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost--while we live."
— John Hepworth

tags: australia, death, fiction, hope, last-lines, the-long-green-shore, war, wwii
5 people liked it

"I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem."
— Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber)

tags: claire, fiction, fraser, historical, romance, scotland, time, travel
289 people liked it

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
— Arthur Miller

tags: commentary, culture, essay, news, society
6 people liked it

"I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me."
— Matt Groening

tags: commentary, family, humor, language, satire, simpsons, social
17 people liked it

"...I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

tags: characterization, dark, fiction, gordon, humor, insight, personal, rob
45 people liked it

"Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion."
— Gary Larson (The Complete Far Side 1980-1994)

tags: cartoon, commentary, humor, satire, social
25 people liked it

"When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway."
— Roger Hedden (Bodies, Rest and Motion.)

tags: drama, hope, life, modern
6 people liked it

"I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I'd backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me."
— John Welter (Night of the Avenging Blowfish: A Novel of Covert Operations, Love, and Luncheon Meat)

tags: fiction, humor, love, lunchmeat, satire, softball
6 people liked it

"Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
— George Macaulay Trevelyan

tags: commentary, education, history, nonfiction, reading, social
7 people liked it

"The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools."
— Larry Niven (Ringworld)

tags: commentary, fiction, science, social
22 people liked it

"Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile."
— Spider Robinson (Off the Wall at Callahan's)

tags: commentary, fiction, humor, science, social
89 people liked it

"I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me: and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
of human cities torture."
— George Gordon Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage)

tags: classics, epic, poetry, verse
7 people liked it

"..the happy hum of humanity."
— Arthur C. Clarke

tags: commentary, fiction, science, social
1 person liked it

"So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs."
— Elbert Hubbard (Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book)

tags: biography, inspirational, memoir, nonfiction, social-commentary
2 people liked it

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
— Louis D. Brandeis

9 people liked it

"I can't go on, I'll go on."
— Samuel Beckett (I Can't Go On, I'll Go on: A Selection from Samuel Beckett's Work)

tags: absurdity, comedy, drama, existentialism, fiction, humor, nihilism, tragedy, tragic
24 people liked it

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

tags: essay, inspirational, lecture, nonfiction, philosophy, self-reliance, social-commentary, transcendentalism
145 people liked it

"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

tags: british, commentary, fiction, humor, science, social, thumb, towel
415 people liked it

"Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself."
— William Shakespeare (Henry VIII, The Folger LIbrary General Reader's Shakespeare)

tags: classics, drama, english-literature
2 people liked it

"Vera incessu patuit dea.
(The goddess indubitable was revealed in her step.)"
— Publius Vergilius Maro (The Aeneid)

tags: classics, epic, poetry
4 people liked it

"'Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.'"
— Jane Yolen (The Books of Great Alta: Comprising 'Sister Light, Sister Dark' and 'White Jenna')

tags: adult, fantasy, fiction, young
24 people liked it

"At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness!"
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Swiftly Tilting Planet)

tags: fantasyyoung-adult, fiction, speculative
54 people liked it

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

tags: classics, commentary, english, literature, ozymandias, poetry, social, verse
31 people liked it

"They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.

'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.'"
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)

tags: fiction, historical, last-lines, literature, retelling
9 people liked it

"The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God."
— Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow)

tags: inspirational
12 people liked it

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