Steff > Steff's Quotes

“The past can be a terrible weight bound to you by an unbreakable chain. You can drag it with you, forever looking over your shoulder at what holds you back. Or you can let it go and move forward. It’s your choice.”
― Raymond E. Feist, Shards of a Broken Crown

“Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Why is love intensified by absence?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Do you ever miss him?
Every day. Every minute.
Every minute, she says.
Yes, it's that way, isn't it?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“You killed more people than anybody in history."

"Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“A strange thing happened then. The Speaker agreed with her that she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that his judgment was correct. And yet she felt strangely healed, as if simply saying her mistake were enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time, then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might be. It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Madness, and then illumination.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“The strangest thing about humans is the way they pair up, males and females. Constantly at war with each other, never content to leave each other alone. They never seem to grasp the idea that males and females are separate species with completely different needs and desires, forced to come together only to reproduce
Of course you feel that way. Your mates are nothing but mindless drones, extensions of yourself, without their own identity.
We know out lovers with perfect understanding. Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed.
That is the tradegy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong,
This is the source of their misery.
And some of their strength, I think. Your people and mine, each for their own evolutionary reasons, mate with vastly unequal partners. Our mates are always, hopelessly, our intellectual inferiors. Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremcy. They have conflicts between mates, not because their communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. ”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words. ”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale