Ian > Ian's Quotes

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“He owns them more completely than if he had seized their balls in his hands”
― Nick Lake, In Darkness

“Maybe it's not really lying if you barely know you're doing it. It should be true. It's the way it should be, in an ideal world.”
― Harriet Lane, Alys, Always

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences—really works. After a few years of doing that pretty much daily, you’ve forged the strongest possible armor to defend against fear: hard-won competence.

Our training pushes us to develop a new set of instincts: instead of reacting to danger with a fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, we’re trained to respond unemotionally by immediately prioritizing threats and methodically seeking to defuse them. We go from wanting to bolt for the exit to wanting to engage and understand what’s going wrong, then fix it.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

“There is no happy medium to our food; it is either overcooked or undercooked, or it has too much salt or not enough, or there is not enough oil in the fried vegetables or there is so much that you almost fear that America will invade.”
― Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory