David Nisui > David's Quotes

“What I don't understand is why, instead of talking so much about this story, you don't just get on and write it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El laberinto de los espíritus

“Sure, I'm skinny,' he said as they hurried back through the stables, 'but I stay drier in the rain.'
'How?'
'Less falls on me.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“What have you got against umbrellas, Daniel?'

'What could be more beautiful than the rain, Don Federico?'

'Pneumonia.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The possibility of death was like the weather—you could make attempts to predict it, but you would likely be wrong, and no one would change their most important plans due to threat of rain.”
― Fonda Lee, Jade War

“Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Now that books had poisoned my feverish brain, his most dreaded nightmare was that I should fall in love with the worst sort of creature in the universe, the most treacherous, cruel, and malevolent ever to have set foot on earth, whose main purpose in life, aside from satisfying his infinite vanity, was to cast unhappiness on those poor souls who commit the serious mistake of loving him: a writer. And for that matter, not even a poet, a variety my father thought of as more or less a harmless daydreamer, who could be persuaded to find an honest job in a grocery store and leave his verses for Sunday afternoons after church. No, it would be the worst variety of that species: a novelist. Those were beyond repair, not welcome even in hell.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El laberinto de los espíritus

“Love don't make things nice, it ruins everything, it breaks your heart, it makes things a mess. We're not here to make things perfect. Snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. We are here to ruin ourselves and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.”
― John Patrick Shanley Moonstruck

“Sam's doctor said to him, "The good news is that the pain is in your head."
But I am in my head, Sam thought.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“What Fermín says is that wise men own up when they sometimes make mistakes, but idiots always make mistakes, even though they never admit it and always think they're right. He calls it his Archimedean Principle of Communicable Imbecilities.'

'Oh, does he?'

'Yes. According to him, an idiot is an animal who doesn't know how to, or is unable to, change his mind.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El laberinto de los espíritus

“Who said anything about hospitals? That's where people die. Hospitals are statistically the most dangerous places in the world.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El laberinto de los espíritus

“The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil. It is mankind that makes a thing good or evil, Reuven, depending upon how we use the wonders we have been given.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise

“That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“When Wen was seventeen years old, she'd sharpened a kitchen knife and slashed the tires on her brother's bicycle. She never told Kehn, who gave on of the neighbor boys a beating over it. After that, Kaul Hilo came around their house in his car every day to pick up Kehn and Tar when the three of them went around town together, junior Fingers fresh out of the Academy, hungry to win jade and earn their reputations. Every day, Wen walked out to the Duchesse to bid her brothers goodbye and to welcome them home. Hilo once laughed as he pulled up to see her standing in the rain. He said she was the kindest and most devoted sister he'd ever met, that his own sister would never do such a thing.

Wen had to admit with some chagrin that she had been a lovesick teenage girl, but she hadn't simply pined uselessly. A small thing like a ruined bicycle could change fate, just as a stone-eye could tip the scales in a clan war. She searched now for the one thing she could say that would make Hilo turn towards her, the way he used to when he rolled down the window and leaned across the seat with a grin. But she was too weary.

'I have to go back out there,' Hilo said. Wen turned onto her side. She felt the pressure of him lift off the mattress, and when the next burst of light from the fireworks struck the room, it lit empty space.”
― Fonda Lee, Jade Legacy

“I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”
― Khalid Hosseini

“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Her heart was a river that carried her to the sea.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Pain reminds us that we are alive.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“They had an ordinary life, full of ordinary things—if love can ever be called that.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“Here is the meaning of life: for a man to find a woman, for a woman to find a man, the creature most unlike you, and then to make babies with her, with him, or to find them some other way, but then to raise them up, and watch them do the same thing, generation after generation, so that when you die you know you are permanently a part of the great web of life. That you are not a loose thread, snipped off. Even men who do not desire women and women who do not desire men, this does not exempt them from the… desire to be an inextricable part of the human race.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets

“The human need to leave something of yourself behind is universal.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets

“I'm talking about the cycle of life. I'm talking about finding some alien creature and deciding to marry her and stay with her forever, no matter whether you even like each other or not a few years down the road. And why will you do this? So you can make babies together, and try to keep them alive and teach them what they need to know so that someday *they'll* have babies, and keep the whole thing going. And you'll never draw a secure breath until you have grandchildren, a double handful of them, because then you know that your line won't die out, your influence will continue. Selfish, isn't it? Only it's not selfish, it's what life is for. It's the only thing that brings happiness, ever, to anyone. All the other things--victories, achievements, honors, causes--they bring only momentary flashes of pleasure. But binding yourself to another person and to the children you make together, that's life. And you can't do it if your life is centered on your ambitions. You'll never be happy. It will never be enough, even if you rule the world." (Theresa Wiggin)”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon

“If our happiness is the purpose of God, … why are so few of us happy?'

'Perhaps he want us to have the happiness that we can only find for ourselves.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets

“It is a will for the species to survive with the self inside of it, part of it, tied to it, forever one of the strands in the web–”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets

“You are lonely…. And humans are not meant to be alone. It's in our genes. We're social beings. Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association.”
― Orson Scott Card