Emma > Emma's Quotes

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'

They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
― Philip Pullman

“He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“You're the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, 'I love you.' And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don't want my square of toilet paper.'

I didn't realize it was toilet paper.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“What should young people do with their lives?' That's a good question, and the writer Kurt Vonnegut once came up with a good answer.

'Many things, obviously,' he said. 'But the most daring is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
― Billy Baker, We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends

“Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“It's hard to be sad when you're being useful.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“In the absence of facts.... we tell ourselves stories.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. —Voltaire”
― Noah Hawley, Anthem

“What's a handshake after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn't have a knife behind his back”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“irony without humor is violence.”
― Noah Hawley, Anthem

“We want relationships to last. We want families to stay together. We like it when the good guy wins. Fairy tales. I’m describing fairy tales.”
― Noah Hawley, Anthem

“Everyone you love will die. Everyone you need will pass from this world without warning or reason. Where is their song, the anthem of their lives, soaring to the rafters, celebrating all their sweet, pathetic attempts at permanence? Where is their anthem of fury, their anthem of love? When the people who fill your heart die, Story thinks, all that’s left is emptiness and regret. Nothingness. And a heart filled with nothing feels nothing. So she doesn’t cry. She just rocks back and forth and stares into the void.”
― Noah Hawley, Anthem

“Whether you believe you’re suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or that 9/11 was an inside job, the World Wide Web exists to tell you you’re right. You are always right.”
― Noah Hawley, Anthem

“But right now, kids in this country are seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They’re looking around wondering if we’ve been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.” In her estimation, our biggest problem is a lack of empathy. Me for you and you for me. Her solution is to create more. Paul Bloom, on the other hand, a moral philosopher, argues that empathy itself is a problem in human interaction, not a solution. He says empathy, “however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning. Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.” Paul Slovic, another moral philosopher, agrees. He says empathy is a poor tool for improving the lives of others, because the human mind is bad at thinking about, and empathizing with, millions or billions of individuals. “An individual life,” he says, “is very valued. We all go to great lengths to protect a single individual or to rescue someone in distress, but then as the numbers increase, we don’t respond proportionally to that.” He describes a phenomenon called psychic numbing, loosely defined as the larger the number of suffering people, the more apathy. So is the problem not enough empathy, or empathy itself?”
― Noah Hawley, Anthem

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“It’s a small world,” I observed.
“When you put it in a cemetery, it is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Billy was involuntarily making convulsive sounds that were a lot like laughter. 'You think it's funny, huh?' Weary inquired. He walked around to Billy's back. Billy's jacket and shirt and undershirt had been hauled up around his shoulders by the violence, so his back was naked. There, inches from the tips of Weary's combat boots, were the pitiful buttons of Billy's spine.

Weary drew back his right boot, aimed a kick at the spine, at the tube which had so many of Billy's important wires in it. Weary was going to break that tube.

But then Weary saw that he had an audience. Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“But survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“People like to forget about the sadness of the city,” Yoshiko responds. “They walk and walk. No one stops. It’s like we’re all still infected. We choose to be blind to each other’s suffering. It might make things easier to bear, but our hearts are cold.”
― Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark