Michelle F > Michelle F's Quotes

“Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.”
― China Miéville

“It had become a chimney poking from a vertical universe of bookshelves.

There was motion below her. There were people on the shelves.

They clung to the edges of the cases and moved across them in expert scuttles. They wore ropes and hooks and carried picks on which they sometimes hung. Dangling from straps they carried notebooks, pens, magnifying glasses, ink pads, and stamps.

The men and women took books from the shelves as they went, checked their details, leaning against their ropes, replaced them, pulled out little pads and made notes, sometimes carried the books with them to another place and reshelved it there.

...

I'm Margarita Staples." She bowed in her harness. 'Extreme librarian. Bookaneer.”
― China Miéville

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.”
― China Miéville, Un Lun Dun

“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”
― Carl Sagan

“Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.”
― Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”
― Douglas Adams

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I did not say "alas!" (nobody ever does that I know of, though the word is so frequently written).”
― Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen – Travel in the East

“Are you a storyteller, Thomas Covenant?"
Absently he replied, "I was, once."
"And you gave it up? Ah, that is as sad a tale in three words as any you might have told me. But a life without a tale is like a sea without salt. How do you live?"
... Unconsciously, he clenched his fist over his ring. "I live."
"Another?" Foamfollower returned. "In two words, a story sadder than the first. Say no more -- with one word you will make me weep.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson

“After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

“Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“Do I have to talk to insane people?"
"You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Woman Who Died a Lot

“I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
― Edward Gorey

“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
― Edward Gorey

“It's well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people's dreams.”
― Edward Gorey

“Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path.”
― Edward Gorey, The Evil Garden

“The world may think it idiotic,
Nor care at all we're symbiotic,
But I will say at once and twice:
I find it nice. I find it nice.”
― Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer