E. Roberts > E. Roberts's Quotes

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—: “‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful & life was so short.”
― Brian Andreas

“Anyone can slay a dragon ...but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That's what takes a real hero.”
― Brian Andreas

“Here then I retreated, and lay down, happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [Original 1818 Text]

“I felt sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature: they were a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or food; and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [Original 1818 Text]

“I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [Original 1818 Text]

“The committee had been baffled by Bee. She had no fingerprints on record. The Committee believed her to be either Florence White, a plain and friendless girl who had disappeared from a steam laundry in Cohoes, New York, or Darlene Simpkins, a plain and friendless girl who had last been seen accepting a ride with a swarthy stranger in Brownsville, Texas.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“Is she the only one at fault? For though she’s spoiled, and dreadfully so, A girl can’t spoil herself, you know. Who spoiled her, then? Ah, who indeed? Who pandered to her every need? Who turned her into such a brat? Who are the culprits? Who did that? Alas! You needn’t look so far To find out who these sinners are. They are (and this is very sad) Her loving parents, MUM and DAD. And that is why we’re glad they fell Into the garbage chute as well.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“It was a scene of such beauty it caught all his attention. Some things beggar likeness, he thought. He”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Fear is the mind-killer.”
― Frank Herbert , Dune

“it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. Even”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What about Hitler? He was one person. They were all doing what Hitler said. What do all prisoners do? They do what the warden says. The only power Hitler had was the power the people gave him. I felt the whole world had gone absolutely mad,”
― Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II

“I’m sure that in Germany people also took an oath of secrecy. We know what that eventually led to. If it works that way with us, the sanctions for breaking the secrecy are nothing compared to the sanctions there could be if we’re silent. All”
― Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II

“They say all people who lived under Hitler were bad because they fought the war with him. That is wrong. We can’t say all people were bad. We must find out why they were with him. If you want to make something better, you must know the reasons why it was wrong and what has happened. My”
― Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The American order thereby upheld the hierarchy of wealth, which some thought was mandated by God and others viewed as representing the immutable laws of nature. Nature, it was claimed, rewarded merit with wealth while penalising indolence.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“And now I’ve got a fever, Marty, only it’s a fever you can’t damp down with aspirin, and I’ve got a shortness of breath the goddamned aspirator won’t touch, because that shortness of breath isn’t in my throat or my lungs—it is around my heart.”
― Stephen King, It

“To them all, Beldame represented the fair and possible reward for distress, misfortune, and labor in this world—it was to them a heaven on earth, and resembled the other, preached-of heaven in that it was bright, remote, timeless, and empty.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“If we say that morality proceeds simply from a good heart—which has little to do with ridiculous posturings and happily-ever-afterings—and immorality proceeds from a lack of care, from shoddy observation, and from the prostitution of drama or melodrama for some sort of gain, monetary or otherwise, then we may realize that we have arrived at a critical stance which is both workable and humane.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination—just one more pipeline to the infinite.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“That’s what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“My name is Hugo. No, just Hugo. That's all they ever called me at the Home. I lived at the Home ever since I can remember, and the Sisters were very kind to me. The other children, they would not play with me because of my back and my squint but the Sister’s were kind. They didn’t call me “Crazy Hugo’’ and make fun of me because I couldn’t recite. They didn’t get me in the corner and hit me and make me cry.”
― Robert Bloch, The Best of Robert Bloch: Volume 3

“Hurting was the only language that the Richie Boddins of the world seemed to understand, and Mark supposed that was why the world always had such a hard time getting along.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“Not all of them who waded into the waters of Lethe found it necessary to take a bath in it, but there were enough—kids who had made dreams their protein.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot