Jackson L. > Jackson's Quotes

“There’s never going to be an end to suffering if ‘he deserves it’ is all the justification people need for inflicting pain.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It takes two to make an accident.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Everyone has a darker nature, Caeden. Everyone. Good men fear it, and evil men embrace it.”
― James Islington, The Shadow of What Was Lost

“The world mystifies when you stare up through falling snow. Even standing still, you can soar. Even alone, you are surrounded. Even mundane, you find magic. I’ve spent my life chasing the fantastical, yet everything I’ve ever imagined can be casually matched by someone tilting their head up so they can experience it. The soft. Settling. Aspiration.

Of snow on an otherwise ordinary day.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“On that day, after a youth activity, another friend suggested we leave to go have some fun. I don’t remember where. Strange, that I’ve lost what this was about, though the rest of the scene is etched into the glacial part of my brain. One of us was old enough to drive, so we headed out to their car.

Five seats. Six teens. They’d already counted.

Without a word to me, the others climbed in. John gave me one hesitant look, then settled into the front passenger seat and closed the door. They left me on the curb. The car vanished, taillights flaring in the night like lit cigarettes.

The memory settled in for the long winter. That night. Watching. Remembering John’s face, which was so strikingly conflicted. Half ashamed. Half resigned.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“Destroying things is much easier than making them.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Good to evil seems evil.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find its just another job. I bet even people like Cohen the Barbarian get up in the morning thinking, 'Oh, no, not another day of crushing the jeweled thrones of the world beneath my sandalled feet.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don't help.”
― Bill Watterson

“You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
What mood is that?
Last-minute panic.”
― Bill Watterson

“You know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon...everything's different.”
― Bill Watterson

“Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did?
Calvin: No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty.
Ms. Wormwood: See me after class, Calvin.
Calvin: [retrospectively] I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”
― Bill Watterson

“You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“Like a man with diarrhea in a sandpaper factory, sometimes all available options are less than ideal.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“You see, that is the sad, sorry, terrible thing about sarcasm.

It's really funny.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Calvin: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?
Hobbes: (Reading Calvin's paper) "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender modes."
Calvin: Academia, here I come!”
― Bill Watterson, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat

“He felt good lots of days. Trouble was, on the bad days, that was hard to remember. At those times, for some reason, he felt like he had always been in that darkness, and always would be.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support – kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists”
― Thomas Sowell

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.
Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“He could think in italics. Such people need watching.

Preferably from a safe distance.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms