Chris > Chris's Quotes

“I need, therefore I imagine.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
― Rumi

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.”
― Albert Einstein

“We cannot build the future by avenging the past.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Everything not forbidden is compulsory”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.”
― T. H. White

“The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something.”
― T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

“Might does not make right! Right makes right!”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Elaine had done the ungraceful thing as usual. Guenever, in similar circumstances, would have been sure to grow pale and interesting—but Elaine had only grown plump.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“A bald man made an attempt on Constant's life with a hot dog. Stabbed at the window glass with it. Splayed the bun. Broke the frankfurter. Left a sickly sunburst of mustard and relish.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“Someone had once told her that if you look up at the sky from the bottom of a mine shaft, even in the brightest daylight, you see the night sky and stars.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a small medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all around wonderfulness. I don't have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad...”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Fat Charlie blew his nose. "I never knew I had a brother," he said.
"I did," said Spider. "I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is."
"Not really."
"Things came up."
"What kind of things?"
"Things. They came up. That's what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all."
"Well, give me a f'rinstance."
Spider drank more wine. "Okay. The last time I decided that you and I should meet, I, well, I spent days planning it. Wanted it to go perfectly. I had to choose my wardrobe. Then I had to decide what I'd say to you when we met. I knew that the meeting of two brothers, well, it's the subject of epics, isn't it? I decided that the only way to treat it with the appropriate gravity would be to do it in verse. But what kind of verse? Am I going to rap it? Declaim it? I mean, I'm not going to greet you with a limerick. So. It had to be something dark, something powerful, rhythmic, epic. And then I had it. The perfect line: Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night. It says so much. I knew I'd be able to get everything in there - people dying in alleys, sweat and nightmares, the power of free spirits uncrushable. Everything was going to be there. And then I had to come up with a second line, and the whole thing completely fell apart. The best I could come up with was Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty got a fright."
Fat Charlie blinked. "Who exactly is Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty?"
"It's not anybody. It's just there to show you where the words ought to be. But I never really got any futher on it than that, and I couldn't turn up with just a first line, some tumpties and three words of an epic poem, could I? That would have been disrespecting you."
"Well...."
"Exactly. So I went to Hawaii for the week instead. Like I said, something came up.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman...”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in cliches and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams. He would be sitting in a chair outside a little cafe on the other side of Aldwych, sipping a frothy coffee and occasionally cheering at an exceptionally well-flung bucket of napalm.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. "Coffee? Water?" Don't say wax fruit. "Wax fruit?" Damn.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Are you going to do it? Go on. You have to do it. I bet you won’t be any crapper than I was.”
Fat Charlie shrugged, in a way that, he hoped, indicated that he contained within him depths of crap as yet unplumbed.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out... and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.
- Sleepless in Seattle”
― Nora Ephron

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love