Scott > Scott's Quotes

“But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle.”
― Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Allow me to give my lord one last piece of counsel," the old man had said, "the same counsel I once gave my brother when we parted for the last time. He was three-and-thirty when the Great Council chose him to mount the Iron Throne. A man grown with sons of his own, yet in some ways still a boy. Egg had an innocence to him, a sweetness we all loved. Kill the boy within you, I told him the day I took ship for the Wall. It takes a man to rule. An Aegon, not an Egg. Kill the boy and let the man be born." The old man felt Jon's face. "You are half the age that Egg was, and your own burden is crueler one, I fear. You will have little joy of your command, but I think you have the strength in you to do the things that must be done. Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”
― Mary Oliver

“I’m not a drug salesman. I’m a writer.” “What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn’t exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else: An Inspiring YA Coming-of-Age Story About Smart Teens and Honest Living

“My mother and father died. Some say they died of broken hearts. They died in their middle sixties, at any rate, when hearts break easily.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Then I thought maybe she did know but didn’t want to look at it. Maybe she did know but there’s all kinds of lies you tell yourself when you want to.”
― Megan Abbott, Queenpin

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind—”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.”
― Marcel Proust

“We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

“They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

“How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Others spoke piously since, being old, they could follow no course but virtue.”
― Brian W. Aldiss, Helliconia Spring

“One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world’s tomorrow, another world’s today. And yesterday is tomorrow and tomorrow is the past. Except, there wasn’t any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one’s mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted on the wall of time. No film that one could run backward and see what-once-had-been.”
― Clifford D. Simak, City

“It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Laintal Ay, you also have an inwardness to your nature. I feel it. That inwardness will distress you, yet it gives you life, it is life.”
― Brian W. Aldiss, Helliconia Spring

“It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Because it will not last,” Catelyn answered, sadly. “Because they are the knights of summer, and winter is coming.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke