Nick > Nick's Quotes

“It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”
― Hugh Laurie

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“And at first it's okay, you know, not perfect, but okay, and you get used to it. Then it gets a little worse, and you get used to that, too. Then one day, you wake up and you don't have the first freakin' clue how it got that bad.”
― Patrick Ness, More Than This

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Fear cuts deeper than swords.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“We're more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“Ginger: You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?... It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It's all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it's even possible to find out. It's all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It's all the wasted chances.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there's no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling 'banana', but didn't know how you stopped.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress