Jay D. > Jay's Quotes

“I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!”
― Mark Twain

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Solitude matters, and for some people, it's the air they breathe”
― Susan Cain

“any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes....”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Well. What can we do, except try to do better?”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Body found floating by the docks...”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse’ Joseph Brodsky”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged

“You have to realistic about these things.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“No one cares about the past any more,' he whispered. 'They don't see that you can't have a future without a past.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Why do I do this?”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Fucking pinks!”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Back to the mud with you, Forley. We’re the poorer, and the ground’s the richer for it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself