Oscar > Oscar's Quotes

“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Turn soft and lovely anytime you have the chance.”
― Jenny Holzer

“You confuse me with something that is in you. I will not predict how you want to use me.”
― Jenny Holzer

“SOME DAYS YOU WAKE AND
IMMEDIATELY START TO WORRY.
NOTHING IN PARTICULAR IS WRONG,
IT¹S JUST THE SUSPICION THAT
FORCES ARE ALIGNING QUIETLY
AND THERE WILL BE TROUBLE.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Knowing yourself lets you understand others.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Raise boys and girls the same way.”
― Jenny Holzer

“With all the holes in you already there's no reason to define the outside environment as alien.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Sometimes success demands a certain refined insanity.”
― Isobelle Carmody, The Keeping Place

“Sometimes I am afraid for people like you who have to know things. Your kind will dig and hunt and worry at it until one day you will find what is hidden, waiting for you.”
― Isobelle Carmody, Obernewtyn

“What's your name?'
'Names!' she sniffed, rolling her eyes. 'People always want names, don't they? They're mad about naming. I will let the moment name me.' she eyed Jack expectantly.
'You want me to name you?' he asked.
'People from the other side are very dull,' she sighed.
'Give yourself a name for me. I don't need naming for myself, do I?”
― Isobelle Carmody, Greylands

“Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.”
― Isobelle Carmody

“Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.”
― Isobelle Carmody

“My favourite mentor brother told me that there were three kinds of people: followers, leaders and scouts. Scouts are capeable of leadership, but they could not tolerate the responsibility of it. Disinclined to take orders either, they invariably flouted authority and fomented strife. This is why scouts, he said wryly, were the first to be sent into danger, It was half hoped they would be killed. 'I fear you are destined to trouble us as a scout, little sister' he said”
― Isobelle Carmody, Green Monkey Dreams

“If we know one thing from experience it is that oppression does not crush rebellion, no matter how it tries,' I told him. 'It breeds it anew with every tyrannical act.”
― Isobelle Carmody, Red Queen: Obernewtyn Chronicles: Book 7

“Speak less and say more”
― Isobelle Carmody, The Keeping Place

“I was suddenly stricken with a feeling of black despair, hopelessly muddled by what was right and wrong. Nothing seemed clear cut; we did evil in the name of good, and good was done in the name of evil. [Chapter 27, page 306]”
― Isobelle Carmody, Ashling

“Fear is an animal that lives inside every person and gets bigger and more dangerous the faster you run from it.”
― Isobelle Carmody, Comes the Night

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“...and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn’t have to do physical work.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition’s lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“In the 1960s, the Stanford historian Peter Laslett did a careful study of British marriage records and found that at no time in the recorded past did people regularly marry at very early ages. Between 1619 and 1660, for instance, 85 percent of women were nineteen”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life