Nick > Nick's Quotes

“When you rebuild yourself to be the type of person you want to be, there are two versions of you that must be constructed: The “you” that exists within your own mind The “you” that exists in the minds of other people”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life: A Guide to Creating Your Own Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions

“My conscience was at stake and you saved it against the rites of bitter religion. I never… there are things I can’t believe in, but… Angels don’t exist, but some people may as well be. You may as well be an angel to me.”
― Daniel Cuervonegro, Sins of the Maker

“Imagine someone from that future could go back in time and talk to you—someone who lives at a time in which mankind only inhabits one planet, who is arguably among the final generations of humans capable of permanently changing the future of human cultures across thousands of planets by creating a durable culture and high-fertility-rate family that carries prosocial values into the future. Why would you tell them you didn’t make an effort to fix things while one person's efforts could still make a difference? ”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“Emily was beginning to realize that the word hope had a different meaning than the word dream.”
― Steven Decker, Projector for Sale

“Black stood naked and stretched. It took twenty minutes to feel normal. Fuck elite. He felt old.”
― William Kely McClung, Black Fire

“Nagumo was suddenly on his own. At this crucial time, the cost of his failure to learn the complicated factors that played into carrier operations suddenly exploded. Now, when every minute counted, it was too late to learn the complexities involved in loading different munitions on different types of planes on the hangar deck, too late to learn how the planes were organized and spotted on the flight decks, too late to learn the flight capabilities of his different types of planes, and far too late to know how to integrate all those factors into a fast-moving and efficient operation with the planes and ordnance available at that moment. Commander Genda, his brilliant operations officer, couldn’t make the decisions for him now. It was all up to Nagumo. At 0730 on June 4, 1942, years of shipbuilding, training, and strategic planning had all come to this moment. Teams of highly trained pilots, flight deck personnel, mechanics, and hundreds of other sailors were ready and awaiting his command. The entire course of the battle, of the Combined Fleet, and even perhaps of Japan were going to bear the results of his decisions, then and there.”
― Dale A. Jenkins, Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway

“No one will ever forget that night, and what it meant for this country. But I will never forget the man and what he meant to me.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“He was so full of disgust, disgust at the world and at himself, that he could not weep.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“Reporters quickly keyed on the darker force behind the attack: this spooky Trench Coat Mafia. It grew more bizarre by the minute. In the first two hours, witnesses on CNN described the TCM as Goths, gays, outcasts, and a street gang. “A lot of the time they’ll, like, wear makeup and paint their nails and stuff,” a Columbine senior said. “They’re kind of—I don’t know, like Goth, sort of, like, and they’re, like, associated with death and violence a lot.” None of that would prove to be true. That student did not, in fact, know the people he was describing. But the story grew.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgment this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings. No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“(...) if you are smart enough, you can look at anything and think of twenty possible ways that is might be useful at some point in the future, so you just keep it.”
― Andrew Clements

“Stand in the machine there, let’s see what state your internal organs are in. The images
will be projected on screen, and I can go through the diagnosis with you, step by step.”
Brown did as he was told and soon images of his vital organs appeared on the screen.
 As you can see, your heart is slightly enlarged and your lungs and kidneys are not in
good shape either. Have you been experiencing any pain lately?”
“Not that I can think of. What can you do to help?”
“Difficult to say, you see you are dying” said the Doctor. You can see the
discolouration in your kidneys.” Brown strained his eyes.”
― Max Nowaz, The Arbitrator

“Yes. But terrible heresies have proven to be grim truths many times before in the longer history of my Church, Sek Hardeen.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.

When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.

In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed.

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Ah, my princess. Noble steed. How does the morning find you both?”
― Eoin Colfer, The Atlantis Complex

“I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“Won’t everything be all right if she’s free?”
― Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain

“Sophie took the book out of his hand. ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ she read aloud. ‘By Dahl’s Chickens,’ the BFG said. ‘By who?’ Sophie said.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“Frozen with indecision. Frozen in the cold wind and snow. Just... fucking... frozen. Jesus, already. Make a fucking decision. He fell to his stomach and began crawling. Time to save the world.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“Some 5,000 of Wallace’s 8,050 bird specimens he collected during eight years in the Malay Archipelago were actually collected by Ali. None are named after the young man.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“Earth,” he began, ignoring the impulse to open his notes folder and count the words. He knew this lecture by heart.
“Our home. She feeds us, she shelters us. Her gravity prevents us from flying off into space and freezing, before thawing out again and being crisped by the sun, none of which really matters, as we would have long since asphyxiated.” Artemis paused for laughter and was surprised when it did not arrive. “That was a little joke. I read in a presentation manual that a joke often serves to break the ice. And I actually worked icebreaking into the joke, so there were layers to my humor.”
― Eoin Colfer, The Atlantis Complex

“Sé que mi familia es así pero este silencio me pesa. Tengo la impresión de tener millones de cosas que decir que, en el fondo, no interesan a nadie. Me viene a la memoria lo que decían los supervivientes de los campos de la última guerra al volver a su hogar: las pesadillas no se cuentan. Los demás no imaginan este género de pesadillas. Se instala, entre ellos y nosotras, una especie de statu quo que parece decir: ‘Estás aquí, se acabó, no hablemos más de ello.”
― Betty Mahmoody, For the Love of a Child

“Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.”
― Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

“[...] ele não percebe que descobrir quem realmente sou - o significado de toda a minha existência - envolve conhecer as possibilidades do meu futuro e também do meu passado, aonde estou indo tanto quanto aonde já fui. Apesar de sabermos que, no fim do labirinto, a morte nos aguarda(e isso é algo que nem sempre soube, até pouco tempo atrás, pois o adolescente em mim pensava que a morte acontecia só com outras pessoas), vejo agora que o caminho escolhido pelo labirinto me faz quem sou. Não sou apenas uma coisa, mas também uma maneira de ser - uma das muitas maneiras -, e saber os caminhos que percorri e os que me restam vai me ajudar a entender o que estou me tornando.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. ‘Live forever,’ he says.

And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. ‘Live forever,’ we chorus, throwing our glasses back in unison.

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in wickedness, till we grow invulnerable by conscience; and that sentinel, once dozed, sleeps fast, not to be awakened while the tide of pleasure continues to flow or till something dark and dreadful brings us to ourselves again.”
― Daniel Defoe, Roxana

“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Stuffed cats are able to creep more convincingly than live ones.”
― Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse