Rachel Hartman > Rachel's Quotes

“There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Colin's skin was alive with the feeling of connection to everyone in that car and everyone not in it. And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“It's not the stronger arm that prevails, but the stronger mind.”
― Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent's Wake

“Do not bring violence to the sword. Do not bring heartbreak or anger or passion. You hold in your hand the steel of rationality.”
― Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent's Wake

“You, too, did what was easiest. Don't let that be all you do.”
― Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent's Wake