Chuck > Chuck's Quotes

“Only bad books have good endings.
If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret

“Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret

“Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret

“USE COMMON SENSE. If somebody offers you a thousand dollars for this book, chances are their motives are not pure. Then again, a thousand dollars is a lot of money. Take the money and run.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, This Isn't What It Looks Like

“Why did so many grown-ups want to be young, she wondered, when it took so long to grow old? It was like going on a million-mile road trip then wanting to turn around without getting out of the car.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret

“Some people, no matter what you give them, still want the moon.
The bread, the salt, white meat and dark meat, still hungry.
The marriage bed and the cradle, still empty arms.
You give them land, their own earth under their feet, still they take to the roads.
And water: dig them the deepest, still it’s not deep enough to drink the moon from.”
― Denise Levertov, A Door in the Hive

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

“Awkwardness defines my life.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“He tried to kill himself in grade ten, when a kid who still had his mom and dad had the audacity to tell him ‘Get over it’. As if depression is something that can be remedied by any of the contents in a first aid-kit.”
― Shane Koyczan

“He comes in entirely as an outsider. He lets his mind wander. He’s not endangering his academic position because he doesn’t have one, and he can take those risks,”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt”
― Mark Twain

“but I want to tell them
that all of this shit
is just debris
leftover when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought
we used to be
and if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself
get a better mirror
look a little closer
stare a little longer
because there’s something inside you
that made you keep trying
despite everyone who told you to quit
you built a cast around your broken heart
and signed it yourself
you signed it
“they were wrong”
because maybe you didn’t belong to a group or a click
maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything
maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth
to show and tell but never told
because how can you hold your ground
if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it
you have to believe that they were wrong

they have to be wrong”
― Shane Koyczan

“I’m not the only kid
who grew up this way
surrounded by people who used to say
that rhyme about sticks and stones
as if broken bones
hurt more than the names we got called
and we got called them all
so we grew up believing no one
would ever fall in love with us
that we’d be lonely forever
that we’d never meet someone
to make us feel like the sun
was something they built for us
in their tool shed
so broken heart strings bled the blues
as we tried to empty ourselves
so we would feel nothing
don’t tell me that hurts less than a broken bone
that an ingrown life
is something surgeons can cut away
that there’s no way for it to metastasize

it does”
― Shane Koyczan

“Exclusion is common behavior. But that doesn’t make it unchangeable. And that doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with the cafeteria fringe.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“What made Einstein special was his impertinence, his nonconformity, and his distaste for dogma. Einstein’s genius reminds us that a society’s competitive advantage comes not from teaching the multiplication or periodic tables but from nurturing rebels. Grinds have their place, but unruly geeks change the world. (Walter Issacson, Wired)”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

“Never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn’t apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn’t say sorry for falling. Feelings just are”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“Is it raining in your heart? It’s raining in mine. Is it beating in sequence? Because mine’s out of time.”
― Eddplant

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Is it not good to make society full of beautiful people?”
― Yang Yuan

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
― Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Francis Bacon

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices