Kayla B > Kayla's Quotes

“Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I loved you so much that I thought you were the meaning of my life....I thought that people were put on earth to find other people, and I was put here to find you. To find you and touch your skin and smell your breath and hear all your thoughts. But I don't want to be meant for someone like you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“I guess what I’m saying is it’s not all luck. It’s luck and being a son of a bitch.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“But the habits of memory created all kinds of false harbors.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“risk seeking; she'd always assumed that had been a necessary precondition for the sort of xenophilia that made a person fall in love with a culture that was slowly eating her own”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“she'd never quite stopped feeling like they'd all know she wasn't quite good enough to join them. Now that emotion felt like a vestige of another Mahit entirely, a child-Mahit with a child's fears and desires.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“Mahit couldn't decide if she was horrified, proud, or simply, deliciously, hideously intrigued.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“exile happened in the heart and the mind long before it happened to the body”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Wait for the real problem, Your Excellency. Don’t borrow trouble that doesn’t come to you on its own.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“If she didn't know better, Mahit could think he was an automation. Even an artificial intelligence had more immediately apparent volition.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“She found herself in a state of simultaneous gratitude and fury. (She was getting used to the combination: that doubling, the strangeness of being grateful for something she should never have had to experience in the first place. Teixcalaan was full of it.)”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“I carry exile in my heart. It animates my poetry and my politics; I will never be free of it, having lived outside of Teixcalaan for so long. I will always be measuring the distance between myself and a person who remained in the heart of the world; between the person I would have been had I stayed and the person I have become under the pressure of the frontier. When the Seventeenth Legion came through the jumpgate in bight star-snatching ships and filled up the Ebrekti sky in the shapes of my home, I was at first afraid. A profound discontinuity. To know fear in the shape of one's own face.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Violence," came the retort, "is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation

“And then again, in a society given over, as that of the First Empire was, to the physical sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from the study of the mind. It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was poorly financed since it was less profitable.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy

“the satisfied awe that marks the triumph of someone who has been hovering at the edge of an inferiority complex for three years.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation

“If you're born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, the coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Hardin, as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be merely that they were too used to inflexible fact and far too unused to pliable people.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give. ”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“To oppose something is to maintain it.
They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk in a different road.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“One feels the man's power as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a world that is not listened to. He knows it, and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model... So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don't know. Yes, it has made things difficult.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“Instead, the terrain looked like Nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. When I asked Taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, “Gone.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon