Alli > Alli's Quotes

“The difficult is what takes a little time. The impossible is what takes a little longer.”
― Fridtjof Nansen

“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 embrace those things that make us unique or odd. For only in these things can we locate and then develop our most individual abilities.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch

“..he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Politics is in everything we do, even when we choose to do nothing.

My definition of politics includes the activities of all lawmakers, including
governments, and how they are influenced.

Politics is also someone's opinion abouts about societal matters and how they use their opinion to influence others.

As well, politics is about relationships within a group or organisation that allow particular people to have power over others.

For some, let's call this group the 'Bad Actors', politics is their path, or their method, to achieve personal gain and power.”
― Thomas Mayo

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“OK, she’s dead and you feel guilty, and feeling guilt isn’t something you enjoy. Too bad. Get used to it. Why the hell should you escape guilt? It’s part of being human. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.”
― P.D. James, The Murder Room

“if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“he will always be here because the love we are given when we are loved as a child is stored forever inside us, and your father has loved you so very much, his love for you cannot be taken away nor erased, please don’t ask me to explain this, you just need to believe it is true because it is so, it is a law of the human heart.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“...if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one this is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“She was a non-active member of the Order of the Eternal Flame and did not fight.”
― SenLinYu, Alchemised

“Was that not how you loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt?”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”
― Percival Everett, The Trees

“When it came to me, Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“The priests in church said it would be as difficult for the rich to go to heaven as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I imagined the rich were busy making a gigantic needle with a huge, camel-sized eye. If you think about it, that needle has been forged. It exists. And a ceaseless cavalcade of camels passes through it.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“The sleeping hound of addiction was alive and well in me. It leaped up at a moment’s notice. One cigarette a day went to two and then to forty in a week. And, yes, I knew about the Orange Stuff and the Yellow Stuff, too. (It’s what I drank with Bahadur the watchman in the graveyard.) But I had kept the hound on a tight leash. I had seen enough wreckage among the drugged-out hippies in Goa to know that my life depended on hanging on to that leash and never forgetting about the hound for one single second, even when it was pretending to be asleep.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“My brother and I grew up in the cleft between that syrupy dream and our capricious nightmare, not always knowing which was worse. On balance, if we had to choose between the two, I think I’d choose our nightmare, and he, the dream.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.”
― Helen Garner, This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

“The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“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

“Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“This new world was no Christian commonwealth; it never would be. It was in truth no better than the old, no less ruled by power and vanity.”
― C.J. Sansom, Dissolution

“How men fear the chaos of the world, I thought, and the yawning eternity hereafter. So we build patterns to explain its terrible mysteries and reassure ourselves we are safe in this world and beyond.”
― C.J. Sansom, Dissolution