John > John's Quotes

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“There’s a saying: ‘If you owe a hundred dollars, the bank has you in its power; but if you owe a million dollars, you have the bank in your power.”
― Ken Follett, Fall of Giants

“Straight is my path. Straight is my mind. Straight is my heart. Straight is my speech. Kind will I be to my brothers and sisters. Kind will I be to beast and bird. He”
― William Kent Krueger, Boundary Waters

“David is in the entertainment business, which is what people in his line of work call television news these days. A Roman circus of information and opinions.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond. To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same? Watching, by definition, is different from doing.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then it’s over.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.”
― Vera Nazarian

“During the Battle of Saipan,” Ona murmured, “my Frankie’s job was to pull other boys from the tides. Boys who churned up and then fell apart in his hands. The very same shipmates he liked so well. His job was to remove their dog tags, weight down their remains in loops of chain, and return them to the seas.” “My God,” Belle whispered. “Twenty years old and his paid employment for the United States Navy was to wrap other mothers’ sons in chains. How did my son manage a job like that? How does any son?” She”
― Monica Wood, The One-in-a-Million Boy

“The ache he feels is his body speaking its needs, talking to him—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a mumble, sometimes a shriek. It never goes silent; if it ever goes silent then he will know that he is finally dead, that some other fucker has finally killed him, and that will be that. He”
― Ian McGuire, The North Water

“His friend smiled. “You know what they say about psychiatrists, Frost. They only go into the business to find someone crazier than they are.”
― Brian Freeman, The Night Bird

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“was only when talk veered toward that fogged-in province of burning bushes and giant obsidian cubes that we learned—mostly the hard way—that the more irrational a person’s belief, and the less evidence available to support it, the more likely he is to beat you up for suggesting that belief is wrongheaded. I”
― Ron Currie Jr., The One-Eyed Man

“There is, in all our lives, the innumerable ways things might have happened, and the one way in which they did. The”
― Ron Currie Jr., The One-Eyed Man

“There are people who can manage such things. There are those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone. Those of us with the courage to open ourselves to that much lost love and not fear it—who can give joy to a dying child until the very end without withdrawing to save ourselves—those are our saints. It is not the martyrs. It is never the martyrs.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible

“When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. That astonishment had to do with death, with the wiping out of a person, with the puzzlement that the man was simply gone.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible

“So she bowed her head and devoted herself to Beartown’s real traditional sports: shame and silence.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“The total kinetic energy an object picks up by being in motion is half of its mass times its velocity squared. So a tenfold increase in an object’s velocity increases the energy it carries a hundredfold.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Infinity Born

“The great martial artist Bruce Lee had once commented, “If someone comes at you with a sword, run if you can. Kung Fu doesn’t always work.” In”
― Douglas E. Richards, Infinity Born

“Jordan Two, on the other hand, was condemned to a state of being that made the harshest solitary confinement look like a mercy. Condemned to do nothing but think for an eternity, without sleep, and in a state of almost perfect paralysis inside a body whose every blink seemed to take hours to complete. Jordan”
― Douglas E. Richards, Infinity Born

“Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy. Religion was just a stick to beat the soldiers with, and anyone who declared otherwise was full of pious drivel.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“A vision washes over my mind. Elena’s innocent face, inches away from mine, her arms tight around my neck. Somewhere, a dragon is roaring, flecks of hot spittle twirling past in yellow clouds. The silhouette of a woman wavers in the haze—death incarnate.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, The Clockwork Dynasty

“Her weight is delicate in my arms, like a leaf carried on the quaking back of this monstrous river. I chose to protect her and I failed. I do not know if the choices we make are ours or not; whether the planets hold any more agency in their orbits than we do in ours. But even if I am a prisoner to clockwork, I cannot imagine leaving her.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, The Clockwork Dynasty

“You’re not used to having a life follow you when you leave it behind.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“Why did his mind pick its way as delicately as a cat through cactus?”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“When flint strikes steel, it knocks microscopic flecks of metal into the air. The metal burns because of some complicated crap related to surface area and oxidization rates. Basically, it rusts so fast that the reaction heat makes fire.”
― Andy Weir, Artemis

“The request had been impossible to refuse, delivered as it was in Darcy’s perennial air of wry cheer—a demeanor Aaron was certain was tattooed onto the English genome, right beside wry despair.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink