Nancy > Nancy's Quotes

“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”
― Ted Chiang

“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Life itself is the most wonderful fairytale.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“At some point in your life, this statement will be true: tomorrow you will lose everything forever.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?"

"I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?"

"Yes," she said.

"That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“When men die, they die in fear", he said. "They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living - in hope. They don't know what's happening, so they expect nothing, they don't ask you to hold their hand - but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you're on your own. Do you understand?”
― Tea Obreht

“Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”
― Bill Bryson

“What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot

“I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Ya know, Joey,’ Uncle Ed would say, ‘there’s no accountin’ for horses’ asses.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“...poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves—they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“There are no heroes...We're all just ordinary men - well I'm an ordinary demon - faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.”
― Ken Liu

“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking, don't settle.”
― Steve Jobs

“Do you want to live a long, healthy, and prosperous life? Don’t smoke. Exercise. Eat right. But also take good care of your interpersonal relationships and the way you deal with life’s inevitable upsets and traumas. Your mind-set, your coping strategies, how you navigate challenging circumstances, your capacity to transcend distress, your capacity to love – these things, I believe, are also a matter of life and death.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: A History

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.”
― Woolf Virginia, A Room of One's Own