Tobias Langhoff > Tobias's Quotes

“How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”
― John Williams, Stoner

“For a few moments in the evening, then, they talked quietly and casually, as if they were old friends or exhausted enemies.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“she spoke as if the future were a hypothetical problem to be solved.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City

“Too many dots," Miller said. "Not enough lines.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Stars are better off without us.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“His words were full of hope and threat.

Like the stars.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“A world no longer of haves and have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban’s War

“She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“Fish and company start to smell after three days.”
― James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“It was a real book— onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner: Early Stories

“The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“Keep cool but care”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“A screaming comes across the sky.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Shall I project a world?”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49