Penelope > Penelope's Quotes

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”
― Ben Okri

“I have come to believe that hard times are not just meaningless suffering and that something good might turn up at any moment. That's a big change for someone who used to come to in the morning feeling sentenced to another day of life. When I wake up today, there are lots of possibilities. I can hardly wait to see what's going to happen next.”
― Alcoholics Anonymous

“How slow life is, how violent hope is.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
― Isaac Asimov

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Wind is lord and change is sovereign of the strand.”
― Algernon Charles Swinburne

“because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
oh total being...”
― Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol = Sunstone

“better the crime,
the suicides of lovers, the incest committed
by brother and sister like two mirrors
in love with their likeness, better to eat
the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed
of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous
vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears
a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,
better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn
the mill that squeezes out the juice of life,
that turns eternity into empty hours,
minutes into prisons, and time into
copper coins and abstract shit”
― Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol = Sunstone

“life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away”
― Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol = Sunstone

“like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts,
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way”
― Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol = Sunstone

“I heard my blood, singing in its prison,
and the sea sang with a murmur of light,
one by one the walls gave way,
all of the doors were broken down,
and the sun came bursting through my forehead,
it tore apart my closed lids,
cut loose my being from its wrappers,
and pulled me out of myself to wake me
from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone”
― Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol = Sunstone

“oh life to live, life already lived,
time that comes back in a swell of sea,
time that recedes without turning its head,
the past is not past, it is still passing by,
flowing silently into the next vanishing moment”
― Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol = Sunstone

“I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.”
― Leni Riefenstahl

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
― Thomas Edison

“There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.”
― Sophie Kinsella, The Undomestic Goddess

“German woman yanked Isabelle forward. She stumbled along, her feet screaming in pain,”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“trolley with Jenny’s body on it was wheeled past us, surrounded”
― Rosamund Lupton, Afterwards

“I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.”
― William Trevor

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“It's true. I doubt. I doubt because I seek the truth. Doubt has served me well.”
― Bradley Steffens, The Prisoner of Al Hakim

“car. I heard the sound of piano music as I stepped through”
― Dete Meserve, Good Sam

“reception room. Mr. Razin will bring you further instructions." No sooner had she left the office than Petrov pointed his chair toward Alex Razin. "Well, Razin, what do you think?" "Of her? As you said—she is nearly perfect. Let her hair grow longer, eliminate the small cheek scar, shorten the nose slightly, and she is Billie Bradford." "No, I mean my story. Did she believe it?”
― Irving Wallace, The Second Lady

“whatever she was up to, the whole thing made him”
― Elizabeth Gaffney, Metropolis

“sentence for him. “Lots”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Pale Horseman

“very bright), there are different kinds of”
― Sophie Hannah, Woman with a Secret

“headed south. “Do you hear”
― Charles Belfoure, House of Thieves