Sam > Sam's Quotes

“Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
― James Baldwin

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
― Tom Rob Smith, Agent 6

“And yet - when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds one-self pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Accept who you are. Unless you're a serial killer.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding

“If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Don't cling to things because everything is impermanent.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?"

"Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel."

"And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Do things that make you happy within the confines of the legal system.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding

“Leaning forward in your chair when someone is trying to squeeze behind you isn't enough. You also have to move the chair.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding

“They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't."

Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”
― John Green

“I know that's what people say-- you'll get over it. I'd say it, too. But I know it's not true. Oh, youll be happy again, never fear. But you won't forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.”
― George R.R. Martin

“You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different..”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Everyone keeps telling me that time heals all wounds, but no one can tell me what I’m supposed to do right now. Right now I can’t sleep. It’s right now that I can’t eat. Right now I still hear his voice and sense his presence even though I know he’s not here. Right now all I seem to do is cry. I know all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still don’t know what to do with all this hurt right now.”
― Nina Guilbeau, Too Many Sisters

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.”
― Jodi Picoult

“I’ve always felt that the best place to hide a body is in the trunk of a cop car, with a note affixed to the body that reads, “I’m sorry.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.