Mike Mullin > Mike's Quotes

“The few trees still upright were stripped of their branches, lonely flagpoles without a nation to claim them.”
― Mike Mullin, Ashfall

“Do forgive me.... I've no reputation of my own, and I forget they matter.”
― Saundra Mitchell, The Vespertine

“Will there be poppy juice in it?"
Phresine shook her head.
"Good. My wife and I agreed that only my wine was to be poisoned.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia

“And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.”
― Gary Paulsen, Hatchet

“If Melissa Miller were an artist, she would have painted the world in vicious streaks of red. Nothing like Picasso's rose period, all soft and cheerful and so optimistic that it made you want to puke. Missy's red phase would have been brutal and bright enough to cut your eyes. Missy's art would have been honest.”
― Jackie Kessler, Rage

“Sometimes I think I'm an alien that accidentally fell off the mother ship, destined to wander among clueless earthling parents for all eternity.”
― Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer

“I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.”
― Stephen King

“No such word as can't. No such word as babagoozle neither!”
― Charlie Higson, The Enemy

“OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody;
I read because the words that build the story become mine, to build my life;
I read not for happy endings but for new beginnings; I'm just beginning myself, and I wouldn't mind a map;
I read because I have friends who don't, and young though they are, they're beginning to run out of material;
I read because every journey begins at the library, and it's time for me to start packing;
I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready.”
― Richard Peck, Anonymously Yours

“Science asymptotically approaches reality.”
― Philip C. Plait, Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...

“I am using the word theory as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means "guess." To a scientist, you can bet your life on a theory. Remember, gravity is "just a theory" too.”
― Philip C. Plait, Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...

“Read like a wolf eats.”
― Gary Paulsen

“This is the final book about Brian”
― Gary Paulsen, Brian's Return

“In life, the hardest decisions often have to be made more than once. But each time, it gets easier.”
― Matthew J. Kirby, Icefall

“A book is kind of like a good Horcrux, if we can imagine that -- a piece of the writer's soul, preserved in a physical object for all time, and changing the lives of all those who come in contact with it.”
― Cheryl B. Klein, Second Sight: An Editor's Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults

“Mortimer had maxed three credit cards stocking the cave with canned goods and medical supplies and tools and everything a man needed to live through the end of the world. There were more than a thousand books along shelves in the driest part of the cave. There used to be several boxes of pornography until Mortimer realized that he'd spent nearly ten days in a row sitting in the cave masturbating. He burned the dirty magazines to keep from doing some terrible whacking injury to himself.”
― Victor Gischler, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

“[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.”
― Richard Peck

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Crime is for poor people. You don't need to rob the bank if you own it.”
― Josh Lieb, I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President

“According to the fortune-cookie logic most people live by, the best things in life are free. That's crap. I have a gold-plated robot that scratches the exact part of my back where my hands can't reach, and it certainly wasn't free.”
― Josh Lieb, I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President

“Don’t worry about wanting to change; start worrying when you don’t feel like changing anymore. And in the meantime, enjoy every version of yourself you ever meet, because not everybody who discovers their true identity likes what they find.”
― Antony John, Five Flavors of Dumb

“For the first time ever, I felt ashamed of my species. The volcano had taken our homes, our food, our automobiles, and our airplanes, but it hadn't taken our humanity. No, we'd given that up on our own.”
― Mike Mullin, Ashfall

“Semper ubi sub ubi (Latin for "Always wear underwear")”
― Bryanna Lee

“We all screw up. We all wish we were stronger than we are, and not one of us will get through this life without regret.”
― Swati Avasthi, Split

“A librarian can’t live by books alone, and I wouldn’t eat them if I could. Feel too much like cannibalism.”
― Mike Mullin, Ashfall

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

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