Louise > Louise's Quotes

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Steampunk is...a joyous fantasy of the past, allowing us to revel in a nostalgia for what never was. It is a literary playground for adventure, spectacle, drama, escapism and exploration. But most of all it is fun!”
― George Mann

“Steampunk is...the love child of Hot Topic and a BBC costume drama”
― Gail Carriger

“Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.”
― Lord Dunsany, The Book of Wonder

“Better to be the failure who nobly strived than the success who never really had to.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Firstborn

“Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.”
― Charles Stross, Overtime

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“My skin tingled, and suddenly, Deanna materialized before us. I jumped.”
― Richelle Mead, Iron Crowned

“I didn’t share her concern. “Damn it. I should have banished you the first time I saw you. I don’t have time for this, not with everything else. You should be in the Underworld by now. Kiyo isn’t going to kill me.”
― Richelle Mead, Iron Crowned

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
― Judy Garland

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
― Truman Capote

“Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.”
― Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma

“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
― Sid Ziff

“There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

“The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:
A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Most puzzling was his timidity. Giuliani was supposed to be a tough guy, but in the face of attacks by his opponents, his performance had been as limp as an overcooked Chinatown noodle.”
― John Heilemann, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

“I imagined swinging from the punching bag of his uvula.”
― Edan Lepucki, If You're Not Yet Like Me

“The more predictable you are, the better you will be at estimating how long something will take and the more promises you can make about your work.”
― David B. Copeland, The Senior Software Engineer

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
― Greg Mckeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“Every time our child’s texting, TV, electronic games, and social networking take the place of family, and every time our tech habits interrupt our time with them, that pattern is broken and the primacy of family takes another hit.”
― Catherine Steiner-Adair EdD., The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age