Ashok Rao > Ashok's Quotes

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
― Terry Pratchett

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“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

“Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“...when you talk about books everything seems different. More beautiful, I guess.”
― Andrej Blatnik, Zakon želje

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Science is magic that works.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Courage will now be your best defence against the storm that is at hand-—that and such hope as I bring.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Life can be driven by two things - fear or passion. When we are driven by passion, our fear takes the backseat and enjoys the ride. When we are driven by fear, there is no ride.”
― talia

“I yearn for empty thoughts and silence in my head. For someone to sit down beside me, to hold my hand and take away the cold sting of loneliness that creeps under my skin like an English winter.”
― Malia Zaidi, A Poisonous Journey

“At some point, the family you create is more important than the one you were born into.”
― Shilpi Somaya Gowda, Secret Daughter

“Houses need humans,” Red said. “You all should know that. Oh, sure, humans cause wear and tear—scuffed floors and stopped-up toilets and such—but that’s nothing compared to what happens when a house is left on its own. It’s like the heart goes out of it. It sags, it slumps, it starts to lean toward the ground.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“During Aurangzeb’s rule, which lasted for forty-nine years from 1658 onwards, there were many phases during which Pandits were persecuted. One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru’s martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved.”
― Rahul Pandita, Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir

“Beauty means realising that everything is beautiful and all things are within you.”
― Pete Brigham

“Peace is a choice. We make this choice when we remember the Oneness that unites us all.”
― Pete Brigham

“On the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's 70th birthday. "Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.”
― Albert Einstein

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.
"How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!
"I don't know," she said, shrugging.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.”
― Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

“I would die for you. But I won't live for you.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“My monk had to be a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerance for the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with all its enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from the beginning. Only later did readers begin to wonder and ask about his former roving life, and how and why he became a monk. For reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and write a book about his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, the entire sequence of novels proceeds steadily season by season, year by year, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on his vocation, I was glad to use it. So here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an age of relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented by cantankerous schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always been an unquestioning believer. What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and a different challenge.”
― Ellis Peters, A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael

“Major thinkers in this century from a wide range of traditions in philosophy are scarcely comprehensible without understanding their relation to Hegel. This is true of Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, Kojève (whose thought has been reworked by Francis Fukuyama in his writing on the ‘end of history’), Derrida, Lacan, Rorty, Royce, Althusser, Charles Taylor, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and many others.”
― Raymond Plant, The Great Philosophers: Hegel

“He never wanted any of my friends round. I had plenty of friends when we first got married, but if they came to visit when he was at home, he’d be rude to them and make them feel uncomfortable. So, eventually, they made excuses and stopped coming.”
― Imogen Clark, Postcards From a Stranger