Nan > Nan's Quotes

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of town, and sat glumly on the bed, which was damp, and flipped through the little information brochure, which was also damp. It said that the planet of NowWhat had been named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across light years of space to reach the furthest unexplored outreaches of the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Suffering is cheap as clay and twice as common. What matters is what each man makes of it.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“Mr Tanner frowned at him, as though he was a spelling mistake.”
― Tom Holt, The Portable Door

“If the Good Lord had intended us to crawl, he'd have given us a hundred legs and an exosqueleton.”
― Tom Holt, In Your Dreams

“Now Coraline," said Miss Spink, "what's your name?"
"Coraline," said Coraline.
"And we don't know each other, do we?"
Coraline looked at the thin young woman with black button eyes and shook her head slowly.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Dès qu'on nous embrasse, il est bon de prévoir, tout de suite, l'instant où nous serons giflés.”
― Jules Renard, L'Écornifleur

“Why us?" he said. "Why is it happening to us?"
"Everything has to happen to someone," said Ginger.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“This book is written in blood.
Is it written entirely in blood?
No, some of it is written in tears.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“This book is written in blood.

Is it written entirely in blood?

No, some of it is written in tears.

Are the blood and tears all mine?

Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different matter.

As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e. her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head:

OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts—it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved—but the fat woman’s act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I have been forced to live with something awful, and I will never be grateful for the personal development I have had to endure to survive it. Acknowledging”
― 404 Ink, Nasty Women

“Take a moment and ask yourself who are the real nasty women? Those of us who struggle to empower all women or those of us who empower men who ensure we remain second-class citizens?”
― 404 Ink, Nasty Women

“I am aware, as I sort herbs or learn about mushrooms, or read a friend’s tarot, that perhaps what I am primarily interested in is power. Power against the constant, disempowering experience of being a woman.”
― 404 Ink, Nasty Women

“It occurred to me that my disability wasn’t something to overcome, that it instead had intrinsically shaped the person I was. It was me and when people rejected that, it felt like they wanted it to go away. They wanted a part of me to go away.”
― 404 Ink, Nasty Women

“By now it was clear that her Droplet was gone. She’d been replaced by this enormous, ugly, clumsy thing with its big head and skinny arms—a real baby, and not at all hers. The”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

“aucun autre dieu n'a inspiré à ses adorateurs le mépris et la haine de ceux qui prient à de différents autels.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien

“J'avais fini par faire de ma mortelle envie un rempart contre elle-même : la perpétuelle possibilité du suicide m'aidait à supporter moins impatiemment l'existence, tout comme la présence à portée de la main d'une potion sédative calme un homme atteint d'insomme.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own