Katie (never.ending.reading.list) > Katie (never.ending.reading.list)'s Quotes

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“You're mine," she whispered. "Mine, as I'm yours. And if we die, we die. All men must die, Jon Snow. But first, we'll live.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”
― Michael Crichton

“History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I'm done reading.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

“I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.”
― joseph heller, Catch-22

“Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along. ”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“He said, "Everyone knows how short life is. Fiona and I know it especially. But no one ever talks about how long it is.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy