Chris > Chris's Quotes

“So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“So come with me, where dreams are born, and time is never planned. Just think of happy things, and your heart will fly on wings, forever, in Never Never Land!”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. “Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid Deal with it.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“You've learned a new rule and it's simple: don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“Rich people can be generous, even the ones with bloodcurdling political views can be generous, but most believe in generosity on their own terms, and underneath (not so deep, either), they’re always afraid someone is going to steal their presents and eat their birthday cake.”
― Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes

“Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?”
― Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes

“Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
― Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes

“Most people are sheep and sheep don't eat meat”
― Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes

“If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“By this time I was no
longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the
limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,
and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“It is when suffering finds a voice and
sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“He says presents aren't important, but I think they are - not because of how much they cost, but for the opportunity they provide to say I understand you.”
― David Levithan, My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

“I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.”
― Matt de la Pena, My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

“Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality.”
― Holly Black, My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories