Adam > Adam's Quotes

“As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“Why does nothing change, even when you set out for a faraway place?”
― Young-Ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“Check out that one at the end. He's taken the form of a footstool. Weird...but somehow I like his style."

"That is a footstool.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Golem's Eye

“There is no dignity for either the sufferer or the torturer”
― James Clavell, Shogun

“People always say it's harder to heal a wounded heart than a wounded body. Bullshit. It's exactly the opposite—a wounded body takes much longer to heal. A wounded heart is nothing but ashes of memories. But the body is everything. The body is blood and veins and cells and nerves. A wounded body is when, after leaving a man you’ve lived with for three years, you curl up on your side of the bed as if there’s still somebody beside you. That is a wounded body: a body that feels connected to someone who is no longer there.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“And that's how we ended up discovering the evil horses that threatened all of humanity.”
― Katherine Alice Applegate, The Unknown

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”
― Haruki Murakami

“According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, mainly because, no matter how cool, stylish, composed, unflappable, manly, or defiant you are, at the end of the day you're also dead. Which is a little too permanent for my liking.”
― Jonathan Stroud, Ptolemy's Gate

“Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.”
― Banana Yoshimoto

“The poets say some moths will do anything out of love for a flame
[...]
The moth takes off again, and we both step back, because he's circling at eye level now and seems to have lost rudder control, smacking into the wall on each round. He circles lower and lower, spinning around the candle in tighter revolutions, like a soap sud over an open drain. A few times he seems to touch the flame, but dances off unhurt.
Then he ignites like a ball of hair, curling into an oily puff of fumes with a hiss. The candle flame flickers and dims for a moment, then burns as bright as before.
Moth Smoke Lingers.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski

“The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is."
So?"
So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it.
Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,
that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook
your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Test can't messure what really matters.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead