John > John's Quotes

“Sometimes it seems unfair that events so old can reach forward through the years, sinking claws into one's life and twisting all that follows it. Yet perhaps that is the ultimate justice: we are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. There is no escaping that, not for any of us.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.”
― Steven Erikson, House of Chains

“[T]he unnamed soldier is a gift. The named soldier--dead, melted wax--demands a response among the living...a response no-one can make. Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous--as if cursed--while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?

Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Reading brings us unknown friends”
― Honore de Balzac

“I've learned, in my tragic little life, that memories are like water. Not solid, like some people think. Once something happens, it isn't set it stone. It can change.

You can make yourself believe anything if you lie to yourself enough.”
― Dawn Kurtagich, The Dead House

“the gardener, an old sailor, made him a hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow. And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the vicarage, reading, reading passionately.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful. Years after I could have benefited from them, the insights come to me.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin