Jeff > Jeff's Quotes

“In that moment, I realized how dangerous it was to keep company with the characters from books. They lived books lives of fierce deeds and deep yearning.”
― Jeffrey Ford, Ahab's Return: A Haunting Moby-Dick Retelling – Captain Ahab Hunts Ishmael in Gothic 1800s New York

“The world we know is dwarfed by the worlds we don't. Why not explore them all? Being out there in the wilderness, you have no idea what'll happen, really. It could be just you and this gorgeous night sky, or maybe you are surfing and some big ass wave comes at you, and if you don't ride that sucker, it'll put you under and have you for lunch, or you might turn a corner on a hike and there's some beautiful deer and her little fawn-- now that has meaning, all of those things, and I need more of that and less of trying to make money so I can pay bills to live in a way I just don't care about anymore.”
― Erica Ferencik, The River at Night

“The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you've got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You've got to stop. You've haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.”
― Terry Prachett

“Accurate knowledge does not improve people's lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy... There are channels through which reality can become unreal, or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn't mean we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.”
― Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

“They never thought to think that a striped anachronism, one of the old gods, walked unseen among them. The old ones had forgotten; the children had never known. A great thing from an age almost passed, searching for a last place where the deer were plenty and the rivers ran clean.”
― Paul Rosolie, The Girl and the Tiger

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Heroism was a logical alternative, the only neutralizing agent against the atrocious mundane acceptance that the adult world seemed to operate upon.”
― Paul Rosolie, The Girl and the Tiger

“How humans love plundering a forest, like spoiled children with their parents' ATM cards and no concept of moderation”
― Paul Rosolie, Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon

“The jungle at night is the greatest freak show on earth. When the sun goes down the landscape welcomes a churning nightshift of murdering, slithering, creeping, fornicating, stalking, swimming, glowing life. To walk the Amazon by night is to enter a world where you are gravely disadvantaged compared to millions of sensory savants.”
― Paul Rosolie, Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon

“All of it must have been ordered by a great mind, an apostle of nature, one deeply fluent in natural history.”
― Paul Rosolie, The Girl and the Tiger

“You can't stop them. Some people don't care if a girl cries, or a tiger dies. They have rules. I did what I had to and we survived.”
― Paul Rosolie, The Girl and the Tiger

“That's how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can't experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.”
― Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants

“Are you going to nuke us, too, Commander BUTTHOLE?”
― Warren Fahy, Fragment

“He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“Julia laughs—one of the greatest sounds he’s ever encountered—and he can’t remember the last time he heard it. Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“He has wondered lately if that's all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“Jiddu Krishnamurti observed, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“Just find one of those poor sad sacks who go scurrying around the halls like criminals before the home-room bell and walk it right to him. And sometimes they do get killed, in every important way except the physical; sometimes they find something to hold onto and they survive. Arnie had me.”
― Stephen King, Christine

“God could not be everywhere and so he created mothers;”
― Paul Rosolie, Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon

“At a time in history when scientists are recording unprecedented extinction rates and many people feel that the loss of biological diversity and deteriorating natural systems is the defining issue of our time, the west Amazon is ground zero. Nowhere are the stakes higher.”
― Paul Rosolie, Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon

“Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“A bumblebee buzzed past, off on unknowable insect errands. Its body was fat, furry, striped in a way she could only envy. It did not sing. It did not speak. It did not stop to dance for her, or to challenge her to a game of riddles. Fear twisted in her gut, unfamiliar as a needle in a butterscotch pudding. The rules of this world, whatever they were, seemed to be consistent and cruel: they were not nonsense, no, not nonsense at all.”
― Ellen Datlow, Mad Hatters and March Hares