Bill > Bill's Quotes

“He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes overwhelmed with despair.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Songs of Distant Earth

“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“There would be a price... But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e, 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to *now*, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“The word troubled her, though. ‘Indispensable.’ It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,' said Twoflower. 'And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,' he paused, then added, 'well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

“Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.”
― Andre Gide

“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
...Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. ”
― E.B. White, Here Is New York

“Knowing who you really are and dressing the part -- with an air of amused recklessness -- is life affirming for you and life enhancing for other people.”
― Simon Doonan, Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You

“How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“This kind of thing doesn't seem to bother most people. Given the chance, people are surprisingly frank when they talk about themselves. "I'm honest and open to a ridiculous degree," they'll say, or "I'm thin-skinned and not the type who gets along easily in the world." Or "I am very good at sensing others' true feelings." But any number of times I've seen people who say they're easily hurt hurt other people for no apparent reason. Self-styled honest and open people, without realizing what they're doing, blithely use some self-serving excuse to get what they want. And those "good at sensing others' true feelings" are duped by the most transparent flattery. It's enough to make me ask the question: How well do we really know ourselves?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“A group of adventurers is known as a "party," and not just because they like to celebrate their success together in the end. Your party should be as close to you as your family--assuming your family can cast spells, kill monsters, and bring you back from the edge of death.”
― Matt Forbeck, Dungeonology

“As my story came to a
close I realized that I was
the villain all along.”
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt , The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 2