Alasdair King > Alasdair King's Quotes

“The stage has a certain magic to it. It's like singing alone in the shower and letting the trickling water camouflage your horrible voice.”
― Cameron Jace, Insanity : The Best Alice in Wonderland Retelling of All Time

“If you have your why? in life, you can get along with almost any how? People don’t strive for happiness, only the English do.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“The misfortune behaved in the eternal manner of misfortunes and hawks—it hung over them for some while waiting for an appropriate moment before it attacked.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Blood of Elves

“Britain might be ruled by machines, but at least they’re British machines.”
― Todd McAulty, The Robots Of Gotham

“Canned food is a perversion,' Ignatius said. 'I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The digital world was always billed as a great advancement but he remained skeptical.”
― Michael Connelly, The Overlook

“The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's.”
― Tom Parsons, Preserving Patients: Anecdotes of a Junior Doctor

“The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“we all know that the brain’s retrieval system is amazingly efficient, except when you are trying to remember where you put your car keys.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understands things as they are, then there is no suffering.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The world’s first commercial railroad opened for business in 1830, in Britain. By 1850, Western nations were criss-crossed by almost 25,000 miles of railroads”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Racism was replaced by culturism. Today’s elites usually justify superiority in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.2”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. There is an important cognitive and ethical component”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“You’re not going to kill me today.”
― V.E. Schwab, Vicious

“the ineffective had led the inefficient to produce the insufficient.”
― Michael Anderle, Ahead Full

“Sure,” is what his mouth comes up with, and the voice inside his head throws up its arms in disappointment,”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional. He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“The only thing that kept her from going down the detective’s throat was the knowledge that wisecracking was as natural to Jay Ackroyd as breathing. Even when it would result in a lot less pain, the private investigator couldn’t resist shooting his mouth.”
― George R.R. Martin, Double Solitaire

“But he was British and well brought up, so he nodded and said nothing. Soon”
― George R.R. Martin, Knaves Over Queens: A Wild Cards Novel

“Although the Hotchkiss website claims to have twelve Steinway pianos, the school’s music director has said elsewhere that they actually have twenty—plus a Fazioli, which is the Rolls-Royce of performance grand pianos. That’s more than a million dollars’ worth of pianos. If you are playing “Chopsticks” in a Hotchkiss practice room, it’s going to sound really good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“The sunrise, however, represents another victory in the fight for life, a new day, the continuation of existence.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Baptism of Fire

“Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die