Joanna Slan > Joanna's Quotes

“A home was like a silent witness to the owner’s life.”
― Viveca Sten, Still Waters

“You actually don’t need much. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it all.”
― Gene Simmons, Me, Inc.: Build an Army of One, Unleash Your Inner Rock God, Win in Life and Business – Thirteen Principles for Career Strategy and Financial Success

“I promised myself that I would educate myself, and that I would never stop educating myself. It was my responsibility to keep learning. I would spend hours at the library on the weekends and read everything I could get my hands on. Books on dinosaurs. Books on history. I almost read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. And all for free. The reason I’m telling all of you this is that I want you to take this point to heart and make you understand that it’s your responsibility to educate yourself.”
― Gene Simmons, Me, Inc.: Build an Army of One, Unleash Your Inner Rock God, Win in Life and Business – Thirteen Principles for Career Strategy and Financial Success

“He said that children always have different parents, even in the same family.”
― Karin Slaughter, Pretty Girls

“The sky drops silver threads of sleet.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That’s God’s truth.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells’ damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“One of the main recruitment centers and organizing hubs for ISIS is prisons. Whether by accident or design, jailhouses in the Middle East have served for years as virtual terror academies, where known extremists can congregate, plot, organize, and hone their leadership skills “inside the wire,” and most ominously recruit a new generation of fighters. ISIS is a terrorist organization,”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“It was in the mosque that al-Zarqawi first discovered Salafism, a doctrine that in its contemporary form advocates a return to theological purity and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafists deem Western-style democracy and modernity not only fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam, but the main pollutants of the Arab civilization,”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Bin Laden’s mentor at the time was also one of Hayatabad’s leading Islamist theoreticians, a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, who in 1984 had published a book that became a manifesto for the Afghan mujahidin. It argued that Muslims had both an individual and communal obligation to expel conquering or occupying armies from their sacred lands.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Repeatedly between 2000 and 2001, the al-Qaeda leader had asked al-Zarqawi to return to Kandahar and make bayat—or pledge allegiance—which was the sine qua non for full al-Qaeda enlistment.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Now I understand. Average leaders have quotes. Good leaders have a plan. Exceptional leaders have a system.”
― Urban Meyer, Above the Line: Lessons in Leadership and Life from a Championship Program

“Think hard. Be as specific as possible. Ask yourself: “Exactly what is it that I am after every day?” If you are Federal Express, your clarity of purpose is get it there. If you are Disney, it is make people happy. If you are the Ohio State”
― Urban Meyer, Above the Line: Lessons in Leadership and Life from a Championship Program

“For those of you unfamiliar with the term "growth hacking," growth hacking focuses exclusively on strategies and tactics (typically in digital marketing) that help grow a business or product.  The concept was first coined by Sean Ellis of Dropbox fame back in 2010 in a blog post. It has since changed the face of startup marketing, with Techcrunch guest writer Aaron Ginn explaining that a growth hacker has a "mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity.”
― Monica Leonelle, Write Better, Faster: How To Triple Your Writing Speed and Write More Every Day

“Sometimes he wondered if most people experienced the world around them a little bit differently from their fellows, if the assumption of commonality was simply an illusion.”
― C.S. Harris, What Angels Fear

“To the uninitiated, it was a simple if somewhat curious cylinder about six inches long and composed of a row of disks of white wood revolving on a central iron spindle. But to those who knew, it was a wheeled cipher, invented by an ingenious American named Thomas Jefferson. Each of the cylinder’s thirty-six disks contained the letters of the alphabet arranged randomly. If identical cylinders were used by two parties to encrypt and decipher their correspondence, the resulting code was virtually impossible to break.”
― C.S. Harris, What Angels Fear

“It didn’t matter what war was fought, coming back home was another battle altogether.”
― Michael Connelly, The Crossing

“Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day.”
― Michael Connelly, The Crossing

“Or was she just talking, was she one of those people—women, for the most part—who just talk to round out the sonic spectrum?”
― T.C. Boyle, The Harder They Come

“Survival Movement in Hostile Areas,” most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS: B—Blends in with the surroundings L—Low in silhouette I—Irregular in shape S—Small in size S—Secluded”
― T.C. Boyle, The Harder They Come

“three thousand pounds of steel and glass and plastic that no thing made out of flesh could resist. A car.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Harder They Come

“But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it? He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, intuit it. But—they are purposely cruel . . . is that it? No. God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality?”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“do you know what a dying declaration is?” I didn't, although I gave it a shot. “It's a declaration made by someone who is dying?” “It is a term of law,” he said. “If a man whispers the name of his killer and then dies, it's considered good evidence because there's a belief—an understanding—that a person who is dying would not want to die with a lie upon his lips. No sin could be greater than a sin that cannot be rectified, the sin you never get to confess.”
― Allen Eskens, The Life We Bury

“Just as the sailor yearns for port, the writer longs for the last line.”
― Alix Christie, Gutenberg's Apprentice

“What needs has any man, besides those needs we share with beasts? And then I knew: he has to read.”
― Alix Christie, Gutenberg's Apprentice

“Yet in those days the only full texts of the Bible were in cloisters, not on pulpits. Here and there a parish had received one as a gift, but these were locked up in their sacristies.”
― Alix Christie, Gutenberg's Apprentice

“Theophilus. It is a sin to shirk the gifts that God has given.”
― Alix Christie, Gutenberg's Apprentice

“the higher they reached toward heaven’s stars, the farther their feet lifted from God’s earth.”
― Alix Christie, Gutenberg's Apprentice