Akhila > Akhila's Quotes

“You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”
― Brigham Young

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr

“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“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 had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives.

To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates.

'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic.

They've served their purpose.

Nature is unsentimental.

Death is built in.”
― Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Human

“Seeing someone read a book you love is seeing a book recommend a person.”
― Reddit user coolstoryreddit

“We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.”
― Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark

“Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none”
― Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“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

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In books and in life, you need to read several pages before someone's true character is revealed.”
― Gail Carson Levine

“In the first place, [his eyes] never laughed when he laughed. Have you ever noticed this peculiarity some people have? It is either the sign of an evil nature or of a profound and lasting sorrow.”
― Lermontov a, Un Héros de notre temps. (précédé de) La Princesse Ligovskoï

“Books change us. Books save us. I know this because it happened to me.”
― Elif Shafak

“Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

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

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
― Nicholas Klein

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
― Marie Curie