Steph Markowitz > Steph's Quotes

“He had turned to the last page, which was mostly blank. Please elaborate here on any additional compliments or criticisms you may have of this teacher. Extra sheets of paper may be attached if necessary.
His pen hovered over the paper. Then he folded the sheet and pushed it aside.
"What," I said, "aren't you going to write anything?"
Henry took a sip of his tea. "How," he said, "can I possibly make the Dean of Students understand that there is a divinity in our midst?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.”
― Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

“Just because someone has power over you doesn’t mean they’re going to use it to hurt you. People who believe that tend to either be:

People who have been victims of that sort of behavior, or . . .

People who, if given power, will use it to hurt you.”
― Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

“You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but “didn’t have time to read,” I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in … Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“You can't see the future coming--not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I...took some pride in 'not fulfilling my potential,' in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn't actually have that much potential.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic— beyond that, après moi le déluge.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Deer are the sad sacks of American wildlife, so beautiful, so defenseless, so numerous, so dim. Their chief predator is cars. They never seem to get it, about cars or anything else; or maybe they do, but they don’t have a good way to transmit what they learn to their kids, if they happen to get lucky and live past their youth. It’s important always to remember that even if they’re as common as rats, some kind of mammal weed, they are still beautiful wild animals, getting by on their own in a dangerous world. I always say hi when I see them, and try to remember to get the same thrill I would if I were to see someone unusual, like a wolverine. It’s hard, but it’s a habit you can build. Love your deer! Just fence your veggie garden really well.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“This was yet another manifestation of racism and contempt for the South, yes, but also of a universal cognitive disability, in that people had a very hard time imagining that catastrophe could happen to them, until it did. So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen. To others, yes; to them, no. This was a cognitive error that, like most cognitive errors, kept happening even when you knew of its existence and prevalence. It was some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism, some speculated, a way to help people carry on even when it was pointless to carry on. People living just twenty miles from a town flattened by a tornado in Ohio would claim that the flattened town was in the tornado track and they were not, so it would never happen to them. The following week they might get killed, in the event itself surprised and feeling that this was an unprecedented freak occurrence, but meanwhile, until then, they swore it couldn’t happen. That’s how people were, and even the torching of the South didn’t change it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Either everyone’s happy or no one is safe. But we’re never happy. So we’ll never be safe. Or put it this way: Either every culture is respected, or no one is safe. Either everyone has dignity or no one has it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson

“Here’s the true economy, these people said: since the Earth’s biosphere was the only one available to humanity, and its healthy function absolutely necessary to humanity’s existence, its worth to people was a kind of existential infinity. Gauging the price of saving the biosphere’s functions against the cost of losing them would therefore always be impossible. Macroeconomics had thus long ago entered a zone of confusion, either early in the century or perhaps from the moment of its birth, and now was revealed for the pseudoscience it had always been.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions people ask is, Did you say no? This question assumes that the answer was always yes, and that it is her job to revoke the agreement. To defuse the bomb she was given. But why are they allowed to touch us until we physically fight them off? Why is the door open until we have to slam it shut?”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

“Ansel was no evil genius. He did not even seem particularly smart. From across the table, the brilliant psychopath she’d hounded all these years looked to Saffy like an unremarkable man, aging and apathetic, bloated and dull. Some men, Saffy knew, killed from a place of anger. Others killed from humiliation, or hatred, or depraved sexual need. Ansel was not rare or mystifying. He was the least nuanced of them all, a murky combination of all the above. A small and boring man who killed because he felt like it.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Experiencing the ordinary brutality of love does not make one a victim. It makes one an adult,” Maureen Dowd wrote of Joyce Maynard, when Maynard published a memoir about how a decades-older J. D. Salinger seduced, abused, and disposed of her when she was eighteen. What, I wonder, is Maureen’s definition of ordinary? Brutality? Love?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“Someone said that people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really want equal partnership—you know, two full people in a relationship. Two people with demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. What they want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be the complete one, the person who controls the relationship—and they want the other person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but who doesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with all these personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world—but not in an annoying way. Not in a way that would demand you change. So six or seven years ago, this big company in the SF-SD Axis that specializes in AI started cranking these things out. What you do is, you fill out this long questionnaire on your terminal, play a whole bunch of different simulations and puzzle games, and then they custom-produce one for you.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C.S. Lewis.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch