Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Fish die quick in a tank, Daddy said. We needed room, to flourish, to grow, to go to college, to dive deep and go where they never could.”
― Tiffany D. Jackson, Grown

“I was one tiny pulsar in a swirling, luminous galaxy of Iranians, held together by the gravity of thousands of years of culture and heritage.”
― Adib Khorram, Darius the Great Is Not Okay

“How could I be a tourist in my own past?”
― Adib Khorram, Darius the Great Is Not Okay

“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.
As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“A pushover is a bad thing to be, but an opinionated pushover is a worse thing to be. A pushover is nice and goes along with it, whatever it is. An opinionated pushover acts nice and goes along with it, but while quietly brooding and resentful. I am an opinionated pushover.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Change hurts, but it hurts most those who shackle themselves to the past.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dogs of War

“Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.”
― H. G. Wells, The Time Machine