Esther > Esther's Quotes

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
― Robert A Heinlein

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”
― John A. Shedd

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“Don’t ask why people keep hurting you. Ask yourself why are you allowing it to happen.”
― Robert Tew

“If you don't know where you are going,
you'll end up someplace else.”
― Yogi Berra

“It took me the better than a quarter century to learn, the hard way, that hard work at something you want to be doing is the most fun that you can have out of bed (and that working at something you don't want to be doing is a logical impossibility-we are all self-employed.)

To learn that the dummies are the ones who think it is possible to cheat the boss or the customers without cheating themselves; to learn that the smart man finds ways to make everything he does be work; to learn that "leisure" time is truly pleasurable (indeed tolerable) only to the extent that it is subconscious grazing for information with which to infuse newer, better work.”
― Spider Robinson, Antinomy

“Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"
"I've felt it all my life," she said.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold

“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity

“If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity

“The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Cordelia's Honor

“He wanted to know what I saw in you. I told him..." he paused again, and then continued almost shyly, "that you poured out honor like a fountain, all around you."

"That's weird. I don't feel full of honor, or anything else, except maybe confusion."

"Naturally not. Fountains keep nothing for themselves.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honour

“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth.'

'Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how they may endure.'

-Bergon and Cazaril talking over the past”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“Royse Bergon: "I've seen your integrity in action. It...widened my world. I'd been raised by my father, who is a prudent, cautious man, always looking for men's hidden, selfish motivations. No one can cheat him. But I've seen him cheat himself. If you understand what I mean."
Caz: "Yes."
R.B.: "It was very foolish of you to attack that vile Roknari galley-man."
Caz: "Yes."
R.B.: "And yet, I think, given the same circumstances you would do it again."
Caz: "Knowing what I know now...it would be harder. But I would hope... I would pray, Royse, that the gods would still lend me such foolishness in my need."
R.B: "What is this astonishing foolishness, that shines brighter than all my father's gold? Can you teach me to be such a fool, too, Caz?"
Caz: "Oh," "I'm sure of it.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold

“It indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one's own discomfort for a benefit to another.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Demon

“I have noticed a curious bifurcation in outcome in the way romances are written by women et written by men - Love Story, The Bridges of Madison County, every James Bond tale ever penned, even the film named above - end with the woman either lost or dead. And the man free to love, or at least to have sex, again. Romances (in the modern genre sense) written by women end with the couple alive, together, and in a committed and at least potentially fertile relationship, ready to turn to the work of their world. In other words, men's romances are about love and death; women's romances are about love and life.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold

“A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He—or she—freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“You want to be good. All right, I can understand that. But you have to be careful who you let define your good.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“And what is your current complaint?"

I don't like Barrayar, I want to go home, my father-in-law wants to murder my baby, half my friends are running for their lives, and I can't get ten minutes alone with my husband, whom you people are consuming before my eyes, my feet hurt, my head hurts, my soul hurts...

It was all too complicated. The poor man just wanted something to put in his blank, not an essay.

"Fatigue," Cordelia managed at last.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

“We see the world not as it is, but as we are.~Dag Redwing Hickory Bluefield”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Passage

“I was so afraid for you, I forgot to be afraid for your enemies. I should have remembered. Dear Captain.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

“And that was just how it worked, wasn’t it? Happiness handed around and around, never stopping. It wasn’t something one could hoard tight like a miser. That would be like trying to hold one’s breath for later.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Prisoner of Limnos

“It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.”
― Isabel Allende

“Politics is not evil; politics is the human race’s most magnificent achievement.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Podkayne of Mars

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman