Nicola > Nicola's Quotes

“Question not, but live and labour
Till yon goal be won,
Helping every feeble neighbour,
Seeking help from none;
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

“I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralisation, degradation, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.”
― Almeida Garrett

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
― Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV

“One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.”
― Voltaire, Micromegas

“The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Nothing learned is ever quite wasted.”
― Ellis Peters, The Raven in the Foregate

“In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.”
― Ellis Peters, The Rose Rent

“What you do and what you are is what matters.”
― Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many

“Men drunk with ambition and power do not ground their weapons, nor stop to recognise the fellow-humanity of those they are about to slay.”
― Ellis Peters, Dead Man's Ransom

“Viewed as a barometer of inner being, the face is seen to produce certain effects in both self and other. By one set of criteria or another, whether ugly or beautiful, the face is seen as both natural and cultivated - and these terms are polyvalent, signifying, respectively, degradation or purity, artifice or grace. To cultivate a beautiful visage is to cultivate sound morals, and thus to be dutiful - which is why Dorian Gray is such [a] powerfully contradictory character. And the face is also and always seen as a barometer of the characteristics of a people, not just of a person - of the lower or higher development of the race.”
― Elaine Stratford

“... cooptation of the rhetoric of beauty, morality and duty into the realm of commercial life set in train the development of other rhetorics designed to sell growing numbers of products that promised both surface change and inner transformation.”
― Elaine Stratford, Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal: Geographies of the Interior and of Empire

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Remember, the worst hour of your life only lasts for sixty minutes. (292)”
― Michael Robotham, Suspect

“Alcoholics don’t have relationships-they take hostages.”
― Michael Robotham, Lost

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Daughter! Get you an honest Man for a Husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the Honour and moral Character of the Man more than all other Circumstances. Think of no other Greatness but that of the soul, no other Riches but those of the Heart. An honest, Sensible humane Man, above all the Littlenesses of Vanity, and Extravagances of Imagination, labouring to do good rather than be rich, to be usefull rather than make a show, living in a modest Simplicity clearly within his Means and free from Debts or Obligations, is really the most respectable Man in Society, makes himself and all about him the most happy.”
― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife

“In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.”
― Edmund White

“He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.”
― Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

“The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi
ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Feeling in control makes most people feel secure and safe. It doesn’t matter how much actual control we have.
Every human is technically a meaningless sack of carbon clinging to a rock hurtling through the uncaring void around trillions of tonnes of nuclear fire, but that’s too big for a single human to be aware of.”
― Dean Burnett, Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To

“Sadly, the words "reliable" and "accurate" can rarely be applied to the workings of the brain, particularly for memory.”
― Dean Burnett, Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.”
― Rosario Castellanos, A Rosario Castellanos Reader: An Anthology of Her Poetry, Short Fiction, Essays, and Drama