Sima Muckey > Sima's Quotes

“What's that Einstein quote about expecting different results from the same person? I shouldn't feel bad - I'm here, aren't I, I'm not the parent who didn't even text. Or the one who locked themselves in their bedroom half of Christmas. Talking like this, it's become clear that we are the main parts. This has all been about us, the sisters. I hadn't realised. I tell my mouth not to share these thoughts and Dana offers me another cigarette.”
― Sara Pascoe, Weirdo: 'Intense, also BRILLIANT, funny and forensically astute.' Marian Keyes

“It had happened. Thucydides, his archrival, was a general. Glaucon, from his own tribe, was a general. And Pericles was no longer a general. He was just a citizen with one vote. And an idea”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Only someone watching him closely like Celena would have noticed his intense preoccupation, and that something in a split second had happened to him.  She wondered where he had gone when he should have been listening to the sermon, where his soul had gone went it had left his body.”
― Barbara Sontheimer, Victor's Blessing

“Josh's heart soared as he got a taste of the power and endurance in his elk body.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“So, you do speak English. That makes sense now.” Catherine said, shaking her head.

“Of course, I speak English. I’m from Australia, not Tanzania.”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“Mead.
O sweet elixir,
Ye bless the lips and steal the wits.
 ”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I’m being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.”
― Jane Smiley, Early Warning

“The fire, baby. It'll burn us both. There's no place in this world for our kind of fire. My warrior woman. My valkyrie. You'll always be mine. Always. And never.”.”
― Frank Miller, Sin City

“One more try,' he asked, 'We are not quite done.' 'What is the use of trying?' 'It is a thing which people do.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

“A volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.”
― Italo Calvino, Il visconte dimezzato

“What's this?"
"That's a mango." Simon stared at Jace. Sometimes it really is like Shadowhunters were from an alien planet.
"I don't think I've seen one of those that wasn't already cut up," Jace mused. "I like mangoes."
Simon grabbed the mango and tossed it into the cart. "Great. What else do you like?"
Jace pondered for a moment. "Tomato soup," he said finally.
"Tomato soup? You want tomato soup and a mango for dinner?"
Jace shrugged. "I don't really care about food.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“The Constitution of the Unitied States of America Preamble We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Article I - The Legislative Branch Section 1 - The Legislature All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
― Founding Fathers, The Constitution of the United States of America, with all of the Amendments; The Declaration of Independence; and The Articles of Confederation, annotated

“Understand, daughter, that the only reason for your existing was as a tribute to your uncle-father. You were meant to love him. I planned to teach you how to serve him and adore him. You would be his monument and his fortress against mortality.

Forgive me. As soon as you arrived I realized that you were worth far more than that.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”
― Patrick Ness, More Than This

“He reached out a long arm and drew me in, holding me close against him. I put my arms around him and felt the quiver of his muscles, exhausted, and the sheer hard strength still in him, that would hold him up, no matter how tired he might be. We stood quite still for some time, my cheek against his chest and his face against my hair, drawing strength from each other for whatever might come next. Being married.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood

“I was looking for the key for years
But the door was always open”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“One man who had known Lloyd years earlier said flatly that he “hated women.”
― Mark Bowden, The Last Stone

“Curious how things can work on you even when you recognize them.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“We have a dysfunctional dream of the planet, and humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear. The symptoms of the disease are all the emotions that make humans suffer: anger, hate, sadness, envy, and betrayal. When the fear is too great, the reasoning mind begins to fail, and we call this mental illness.”
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“The rich wanted to be kaloi k’agathoi, the beautiful and the good—so let them use their graces in the service of the democracy”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity

“slowing down your responses and becoming a better listeners aids you in becoming a more peaceful person”
― Richard Carlson

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“I soon realised I was making a fool of myself...things like that happen when you are in love with the wrong person. Worse things. things you never forgive yourself for...

...I'll blame myself for as long as I live. It's you I love and always will.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.

In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.

The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.”
― Karl Marx

“You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan — 'An hour of life is still life.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“As puzzled as I was by my classmates’ assumptions, their classification of me as a Black American nonetheless comforted me. Could it be that now, finally, I had my own group to belong to? Would Black Americans claim me just because the whites assigned me to them?”
― Maria Nhambu, America's Daughter

“That's the big difference between [the BookWorld] and [the RealWorld]," said Plum. "When things happen after a randomly pointless event, all that follows is simply unintended consequences, not a coherent narrative thrust that propels the story forward."

I rolled the idea of unintended consequences around in my head. "Nope, I said finally, "you've got me on that one."

"It confuses me, too," admitted Plum, "but that's the RealWorld for you. A brutal and beautiful place, run for the most part on passion, fads, incentives, and mathematics. A lot of mathematics.”
― Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing