Christopher Smith > Christopher's Quotes

“Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.”
― Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

“That word means something else, you know,' his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. 'It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.”
― Hugh Howey, Shift

“When there aren’t any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Gate Thief

“Good men are remembered for their friends. Great men are remembered for their enemies. The greatest men are those who turn their enemies into friends.”
― m. todd gallowglas, Judge of Dooms

“Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway

“Predict the inevitable”, she said, “and you're bound to be right one day.”
― Hugh Howey, Shift

“Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.”
― Daniel Suarez, Daemon

“My only wish is that we leave room for hope. There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful. The future is bright. There are good things to come.”
― Hugh Howey, Dust

“Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately reality has no advertising budget.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“All food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“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

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, he said, but that's normal, because 'a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.”
― Pope Francis

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato

“This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun. But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe