Daniel Ionson > Daniel's Quotes

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Life has ways of getting under your skin, spoiling your fun with too much information. Youth is truly the happiest time where we roll in the bliss of ignorance.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools

“The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Τον φίλο πρέπει να τον προσέχεις σαν τον εαυτό σου, γιατί ο φίλος σου είναι ένας άλλος σου εαυτός”
― Αριστοφάνης

“But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers.
They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better.”
― Jack Ketchum, Peaceable Kingdom

“You can never have too many knives, his father had told him. Unless they're pointed at you, and by people who don't like you much. ”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“Hell, he now understood, went beyond simple torture. Hell inflicted agony with intermittent reprieves to maintain the hope of peace. Hell was not endless dark, but rare rays of sunlight to keep one’s eyes longing for their bright beauty. Hell forced hours of suffocation beneath the freezing water with times of release to keep one accustomed to the joy of breath, to let needful expectation be repeatedly stabbed by deprivation.”
― Daniel Ionson, After Life

“How does evil arise? Where does it come from? We think of malevolent men-— murderers, rapists, tyrants—and somehow believe they are different creatures from us. They are not. All evil men were once innocent babes, once lovable children. Men make choices, some consistently bad. But those who choose the worst kinds of evil were typically guided into it.”
― Daniel Ionson, After Life

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Faith then they vowed
Fast, unyielding,
There each to each
In oaths binding.
Bliss there was born
When Brynhild woke;
Yet fate is strong
To find its end.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."
Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.”
― Terry Pratchett

“The closer one gets to the speed of light, the slower time travels. The exact thing is true when completing a book.”
― Daniel Ionson

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim MORRISON

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers