Cora > Cora's Quotes

“What is the first anesthetic?
Wealth.
And if I take your wealth?
Necessities.
And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?
Acknowledgement.
And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight?
Family.
And if I kill your family?
God.
And God...
...Hasn't said a word in two thousand years. (136)”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”
― Alan Moore , Batman: The Killing Joke

“Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories", said the Cow, "I've heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labour. We weren't beasts of burden, but we were good reliable labourers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we'd be socially redundant too.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“The magic of Paul’s intelligence is that he has more patience than anyone I’ve ever met, and with it he simply wears problems down. To count a hundred million stars, he told me once, at the rate of one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possibly complete in a lifetime. In reality, it would only take three years. The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. And that is Paul’s gift: an intuition of just how much a person can do slowly.”
― Ian Caldwell, The Rule of Four

“I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.”
― Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four

“What a strange thing, to build a castle in the air. We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the heart of what we shared.”
― Ian Caldwell, The Rule of Four

“The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.”
― Ian Caldwell, The Rule of Four

“Hope, Paul said to me once, which whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion...Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.”
― Ian Caldwell

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they'll break themselves trying for what they'll never achieve”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“...it’s like tasting a page of a book and noticing the minute differences between the ink and the bare page and using that to read.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“News is news and spin is spin, and when you introduce the second to the first, what you have isn’t news anymore. Hey, presto, you’ve created opinion.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

“...they turned to the bloggers, who might be unfiltered and full of shit, but they were fast, prolific, and allowed you to triangulate the truth. Get your news from six or nine sources and you can usually tell the bullshit from reality.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

“The truth will make you free, but it won’t make you particularly wealthy.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

“Rick didn’t seem to have any problems taking orders from a woman ten years his junior, either, which can be an issue with guys trying to jump from the traditional news media to the blogging world. They don’t mean to bring their prejudices with them when they make the transition, but some things are harder to get rid of than an addiction to seeing your stories physically printed.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

“I love him, and one day I’ll bury him, and until then, I’m going to be grateful that I’m allowed to watch him talk.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

“Everything is ‘just a story.’ Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, whatever, it’s just a story. What matters is making sure it’s heard.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

“This is the truth: We are a nation accustomed to being afraid. If I’m being honest, not just with you but with myself, it’s not just the nation, and it’s not just something we’ve grown used to. It’s the world, and it’s an addiction. People crave fear. Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves. Our ancestors dreamed of a world without boundaries, while we dream new boundaries to put around our homes, our children, and ourselves. We limit our potential day after day in the name of a safety that we refuse to ever achieve. We took a world that was huge with possibility, and we made it as small as we could.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“You meet those eyes and realize, suddenly, that there’s so little left in you which is capable of fear.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“...we were doing this...this weird circling thing, like we needed to figure out every single line of the script before we could even start the movie. I knew, and he knew, and we didn’t do a damn thing about it... It’s like we thought everything had to be perfect, or it wouldn’t work. Like it was a story.”
― Mira Grant, Deadline

“This is why we have to be careful of how we handle our fear—because I’ve noticed that when people try to kill off their fear, they often end up inadvertently murdering their creativity in the process.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“Dearest Fear: Creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. I understand you’ll be joining us, because you always do. I acknowledge that you believe you have an important job to do in my life, and that you take your job seriously. Apparently your job is to induce complete panic whenever I’m about to do anything interesting—and, may I say, you are superb at your job. So by all means, keep doing your job, if you feel you must. But I will also be doing my job on this road trip, which is to work hard and stay focused. And Creativity will be doing its job, which is to remain stimulating and inspiring. There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home, but understand this: Creativity and I are the only”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“So I don’t try to kill off my fear. I don’t go to war against it. Instead, I make all that space for it. Heaps of space. Every single day. I’m making space for fear right this moment. I allow my fear to live and breathe and stretch out its legs comfortably. It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too. In fact, I cordially invite fear to come along with me everywhere I go. I even have a welcoming speech prepared for fear, which I deliver right before embarking upon any new project or big adventure. It goes something like this: “Dearest Fear: Creativity and I are about to go”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear