Rian van der Merwe > Rian's Quotes

“Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one's conscience to get in the way.”
― Hugh Howey, The Unraveling

“Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don’t socialize enough.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Instead of talking about whether it’s easier to lower a price than raise it, we should have been addressing more substantive issues such as how to meet the expectations of customers and how to keep investing in software development so that the customers who did buy our product could put it to better use.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

“Truth be told, the inward gaze is something she’s not too fond of. But there are secrets that lurk in the mind, and she doesn’t want any of them sneaking up on her. Sometimes it pays to take a deep look inside even if you get queasy gazing into those dark corners.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels

“Niagara. Used to be a place honeymooners would go. Maybe you seen some movies. All this water, pouring over the cliffs, a thousand rivers falling down all at once, like somehow there was a mistake in the crust of the earth and someone had taken away half of a lakebed. And the force of it, water against water, so strong you can feel the spray on your cheeks a half a mile distant. I never seen anything like it. See, that’s the kind of thing that just keeps on going, century after century, no matter what us puny humans are doin all a-scurry over the surface of the earth.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels

“She wonders how people can live this kind of life—trapped inside a house with windows everywhere showing you where else you could be.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels

“These memories—it feels like she’s back there in the moment, like she has the moment to do over and make different choices than she made. But she can’t, because they’re just memories and they’re set down permanent as if they were chiseled in marble, and so she has to just watch herself do the same things over and over, and it’s a condemnation if it’s anything.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels

“Blind is the real dead.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels

“It has become something to her, that memory—something she can take out in dismal times and stare into like a crystal ball disclosing not presages but reminders. She holds it in her palm like a captured ladybug and thinks, Well ain’t I been some places, ain’t I partook in some glorious happenings wanderin my way between heaven and earth. And if I ain’t seen everything there is to see, it wasn’t for lack of lookin. Blind is the real dead.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels

“What I mean is I done some things I don’t care to talk about. Little sister, anyone alive’s got a collection of those things. Maybe so, but it’s one thing to feel like there’s a few rotten things knocking around inside you like some beans in a can. But it’s another thing to feel like those things are what your heart and stomach and brain are built out of.”
― Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels

“Even in the Belt, youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakable conviction that for you, things would be different. The laws of physics would cut you a break, the missiles would never hit, the air would never hiss out into nothing.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Only here on Earth, where food grew on its own, where air was just a by-product of random untended plants, where resources lay thick on the ground, could a person actually choose not to do anything at all. There was enough extra created by those who felt the need to work that the surplus could feed the rest. A world no longer of the haves and the have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War

“Stupidity was usually a lesser crime than vigilantism.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War

“Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban’s War

“But Holden suspected there was a lot more to Prax than that. There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he’d just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War

“It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained—they all swirled together in the mind like a soup.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“It was a debt that Peter could never fully repay: the debt of borrowed courage.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“To have a child was to receive the gift of true immortality—not time stopped, as it had stopped in Amy, but time continuing and everlasting.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“It was astounding, Bobbie thought, how quickly humanity could go from 'What unimaginable intelligence fashioned these soul-wrenching wonders?' to 'Well, since they’re not here, can I have their stuff?”
― James S.A. Corey

“I’d learned my default mode was to perform. Even in small groups I feel like I have to be “on.” But when I’m alone my energy comes back. When I’m alone I don’t have to perform for anybody.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“It’s true our lives can pass small and unnoticed by the masses, and we are no less dignified for having lived quietly. In fact, I’ve come to believe there’s something noble about doing little with your life save offering love to a person who is offering it back.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I don’t mean to overstate what is yet unknown, but part of me believes when the story of earth is told, all that will be remembered is the truth we exchanged. The vulnerable moments. The terrifying risk of love and the care we took to cultivate it. And all the rest, the distracting noises of insecurity and the flattery and the flashbulbs will flicker out like a turned-off television.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“One day I realized something obvious: In all these movies, there was a similar plot. The hero is always weak at the beginning and strong at the end, or a jerk at the beginning and kind at the end, or cowardly at the beginning and brave at the end. In other words, heroes are almost always screwups. But it hardly mattered. All the hero has to do to make the story great is struggle with doubt, face their demons, and muster enough strength to destroy the Death Star. That said, I noticed another thing. The strongest character in a story isn’t the hero, it’s the guide. Yoda. Haymitch. It’s the guide who gets the hero back on track. The guide gives the hero a plan and enough confidence to enter the fight. The guide has walked the path of the hero and has the advice and wisdom to get the hero through their troubles so they can beat the resistance. The more I studied story, the more I realized I needed a guide.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“It’s no wonder I hid from the world. It’s no wonder parties made me tired or I got exhausted after I spoke. It’s no wonder criticism made me angry or I overreacted to failure. I think the part of me I sent out to interact with the world was, in some ways, underdeveloped, still trying to be bigger and smarter as a measure of survival.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don’t have integrity, life becomes exhausting.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action,” she said. “We don’t do that here.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“Alex leaned forward, grabbing Basia’s hands in his own. “It’s still on you. I will never live down not being the person my wife needed after she spent twenty years waitin’ for me. I can never make that right. Don’t go feelin’ sorry for yourself. You fucked up. You failed the people you love. They’re payin’ the price for it right now and you demean them every second you don’t own that shit.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn