Adan > Adan's Quotes

“It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.”
― james michener

“High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“Secretly, of course, the pauses in our correspondence were as calculated as our casualness.”
― Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“Fifty stranded whales are a tangible crisis with a visible solution. There’s camaraderie in the process, a Free Willy fantasy, an image of Flipper in everyone’s mind. There’s nothing romantic about waking up a man on a park bench and making him walk to a shelter.”
― Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my high school self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.”
― Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.”
― Dean Koontz, Odd Hours

“Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”
― Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year

“Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.”
― Dean Koontz, Fear Nothing

“You know when I told you the joke about how a friend will help you move, but a real friend will help you move a body? I was only kidding.”
― Brad Thor, Black List

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“patriotism. During his lifetime of study he had concluded it was the most destructive force on the planet.”
― Daniel Silva

“Face. I should have known. For some men, face mattered more than friendship, more than money, more than love. More than an eye, and certainly more than a daughter. The”
― M.H. Boroson, The Girl with Ghost Eyes

“Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. At the edge of perception, weird things dance and howl.”
― M.H. Boroson, The Girl with Ghost Eyes

“I had decided to let them see me as powerful, a person of consequence, who must be taken seriously.”
― M.H. Boroson, The Girl with Ghost Eyes

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King