John > John 's Quotes

“Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.”
― Stephen King, Carrie

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of that mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made", said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird wouldn't it?”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The half-life of love is forever.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“Everyone is someone's devil.”
― Matthew Dicks, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend

“That's how I gained a lifelong fondness for repeating certain phrases beyond the point of all reason.”
― Roger Ebert, Life Itself

“and the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.”
― Roger Ebert, Life Itself

“So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.”
― Roger Ebert

“When you're young you don't realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older;”
― Roger Ebert, Life Itself

“You can't say it wasn't interesting.”
― Roger Ebert, Life Itself

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy,”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“We huddle in the bed, and she squeezes my hand I-love-you.”
― Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory

“Quite deliberately my friend drops a kettle on the floor. I tap-dance in front of closed doors. One by one the household emerges, looking as though they'd like to kill us both; but it's Christmas, so they can't.”
― Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory

“A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Jesus, Oscar, Rudolfo said nervously. You look like they put a shirt on a turd,”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings - as in the historical Beatles's McCartney - taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine.
...

Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing - her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney - in his Staff room's wall's picture a kind of craggy-face blonde - imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband's pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C's depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“[...] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest