Erika Edge > Erika Edge's Quotes

“The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'

They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit."
"Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark.
"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
...
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
...
"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
...
"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
...
"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
...
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
...
"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
...
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
...
"Stability was practically assured.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed. At that moment all Will's choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it. That's original sin. And I'm going to destroy it. Death is going to die.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Sometimes we have thoughts that even we don't understand. Thoughts that aren't even true—that aren't really how we feel—but they're running through our heads anyway because they're interesting to think about.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass

“Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Twinkle, twinkle little bat How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea-tray in the sky.”
― Lewis Carroll

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more, nor less.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“People who don't think shouldn't talk.”
― Lewis Carroll

“One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby