Joe > Joe's Quotes

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Creativity is as important as literacy”
― Ken Robinson

“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“It was some time ago—in the twelfth century, as you humani measure time—a man from the land of the Scots. I do not remember his name.” Both Sophie and Josh instinctively knew that Hekate was lying. “What happened to him?” Sophie asked. “He died.” There was a peculiar high-pitched giggle.”
― Michael Scott, The First Codex

“In 1924, Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship, and the federal government considered it a national duty to “civilize” them,13 including Alaska Natives. Education was seen as an important force in this mission, and teachers were sent to native settlements to encourage changes in culture, religion, and language. School was taught in English, churches were constructed, and monogamous marriages and patriarchal households were encouraged or enforced, breaking up communal households .14 Historically nomadic Alaska Natives began settling around the schools and churches, often by order of the U.S. government, which in turn provided small-scale infrastructure and health clinics.15 What is now the village of Kivalina, for example, had originally been used only as a hunting ground during certain times of the year, but its intermittent inhabitants were ordered to settle permanently on the island and enroll their children in school or face imprisonment.”
― Christine Shearer, Kivalina: A Climate Change Story

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Sometime later, radiologists from Lower 48 universities came to Alaska to measure radiation levels in villages where caribou and reindeer were the main source of food. The results, published in 1965, suggested that an Alaska Native who ate caribou or reindeer had a radiation body burden 22 times higher than the average Lower 48 resident.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“After a teenage identity crisis, Chuck decided that he was Iñupiaq, and that he had to preserve his family’s Iñupiaq heritage.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“Chuck got himself elected to the School Board on a platform of bringing the Iñupiaq language back to the schools. It became a fifty-minute class, held twice a week, until it was done in by the frenzy to meet the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“Iñupiaq with a “q” refers to the language or one person. Iñupiat with a “t” refers to the people. There’s no such word as Iñupiaqs.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“A tanik history teacher burdened with white guilt had assigned Britney’s class a project about family culture and history. The students are supposed to interview their parents and grandparents about what life was like back in the old days of Harow and write a report. Britney sits down next to her dad while he’s watching a ballgame and asks if she can interview him. He opens a beer without looking at her and says, “Not now.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“That law that created the native corporations was the idea of tanik American corporations to undermine tribal integrity.” “What do you mean?” Bertie asks. “Everywhere else in the U.S., tribes have their own government, their own land, and their own money.” “They have a monopoly on casinos, you mean,” Bertie says cautiously. “Whatever it is. Our tribes in Alaska don’t have nothing. It’s the native corporations who have all the land and the money, and they’re the ones making decisions.” “But don’t you think they’re making decisions in the best interests of their shareholders, the native people?” “They’re just making money for their shareholders like any other corporation,” Mandy says. “And they hire taniks in Anchorage offices to carry out their business. They don’t care about whether people up here are taking their dividends and drinking them away. I hate to say it, but I got to agree with Luther. It’s a long, slow genocide, all done under the corporations’ laws.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“Neither the State nor the Borough can draw revenue from most offshore drilling, since their taxing authority stops three miles from the coast line. But the State is more likely than the Borough to benefit from it, since the oil companies will have offices in State’s big cities and create jobs there. And the State doesn’t care a jot about whaling.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“If the drilling can’t be stopped, why not benefit from it? The Borough would be glad to see some benefits from the oil buried under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which covers a fifth of the Borough’s taxing territory. And the Borough isn’t the only one. Except for a few environmentalists, most Alaskans are disgusted with Congress’s prohibition against drilling in a piece of their state. These Alaskans see it as another example of the U.S. treating Alaska like a colony—allowing liberals in Washington to make decisions about land they’ll never set foot on. Of the few people who have set foot in the Refuge, most are Iñupiat.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“Apparently, you didn’t attempt to talk with the people of Kusoq, who now have to travel over thirty miles and more to get their tuttu—caribou. Why? ‘Cause the tuttu migration got altered by the development of Prudhoe Bay and the connected oil fields. Let me tell you, you open up the Refuge and you open up the Beaufort Sea for offshore drilling. There can’t be offshore drilling without a land base and that land base is the Refuge. And your Assembly is opposed to offshore drilling.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“We’re facing a huge threat from a project the federal government is now considering for the Beaufort Sea—” “Who’s we?” someone interrupts. As long as you have a drop of Iñupiaq blood, even if you look completely white, you can say “we” without having the rest of us raise our eyebrows. Everyone knows Vik doesn’t have a drop of Iñupiaq blood and has been on the Arctic Slope all of eight months. Vik, who doesn’t realize the significance of having said “we,” turns to look at the speaker and says matter-of-factly, “Everyone who lives here and anyone who cares about life in the Arctic.” One of the elders mutters something in Iñupiaq, and Gill translates, “We—in pieces.” “What does that mean?” Vik asks. The elder rattles off something else in Iñupiaq. “She said that the Iñupiaq people aren’t one anymore,” Gill translates, “That they’ve been divided by taniks and money.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“All the guts spilled onto the meat so I can’t eat it no more. And another tuttu got hit in the back, and nobody takes a tuttu that’s hit in the back.”
― Elizaveta Ristrova, We In Pieces: Tales From Arctic Alaska

“A successful member of the Arctic society learns how to listen - to the cracking of the ice on which he is traveling, to the hiss of a sea mammal as he or she breaks water, to the wind, and to each other. The quietness of the Arctic actually involves many noises, but they are quieter sounds.”
― Kenneth W. Smith, Inupiat Parables

“The children of the village are raised by the entire village, and if you and your wife or husband are having troubles it is the problem of the entire village.”
― Kenneth W. Smith, Inupiat Parables

“Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.”
― Frank O'Connor

“Imagine teaching a fifteen-year-old how to drive a car with manual transmission. First, you have to press down the clutch. Then you have to whisper a secret into one of the cup holders.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The boy swelled up, and his skin filled with pockets of blood. In some places, the skin almost separated from the underlying tissue. This happened during the last phase, while he was on the respirator. It is called third spacing. If you bleed into the first space, you bleed into your lungs. If you bleed into the second space, you bleed into your stomach and intestines. If you bleed into the third space, you bleed into the space between the skin and the flesh. The skin puffs up and separates from the flesh like a bag. Peter Cardinal had bled out under his skin.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone