Rusty Reading > Rusty Reading's Quotes

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“An Indian Affairs agent said, 'The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“These unusual times were quickly making for unusual arrangements.”
― Miep Gies

“This is a book about the dead, and the people who are left behind. It is also a personal story, written in my own voice, as a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own. The thousands who died were killed with the permission of my people. I am writing this book because I refuse to offer mine.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long. I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bag rans out. They are hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. They are the cornfields in rebel country and the tent cities outside blackened villages and the backrooms where mothers whispered about the children that desperation had forced them to abort.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“There were corpses every night at the height of the killings. Seven, twelve, twenty-six, the brutality reduced to a paragraph, sometimes only a sentence each. The language failed as the body count rose.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“President Duterte said kill the addicts, and the addicts died. He said kill the mayors, and the mayors died. He said kill the lawyers, and the lawyers died.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Fuck the bleeding hearts. To hell with bureaucracy. There would be no forgiveness, there would be no second chances, the line would be drawn, and on one side he would stand with a loaded gun.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“The law might be optional, the thugs might be at the helm, but Duterte was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said, who might give you a warning and then count one, two, three.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Nanlaban, under Rodrigo Duterte, did not mean only that a man had fought back. It meant he had fought and died. Nanlaban is judgment and justification, verb and noun, a shorthand for the dead bastards who deserved what they got.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“There was dissent in the aftermath. There was an opposition. There were lawyers and priests and activists, but for those of us documenting Duterte’s war, the protests were no more than a whisper in a hurricane.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Maybe those who voted for death thought they had voted for a metaphor.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Is was easy to follow the parade of coffins and imagine these last two deaths as inevitabilities, the natural consequence of violent rhetoric from above and wholesale impunity below.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“I could rail and rage and moan, but in the end, I was the person watching from the outside, looking to lay the weight of democracy on the shoulders of the grieving family. They had their dead. I had my guilt.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country