Rick > Rick's Quotes

“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
― Judy Garland

“Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.”
― George Sand, Letters of George Sand

“And when they start talking, and they always do, you find that each of them has a story they want to tell. Everyone, no matter how old or young, has some lesson they want to teach. And I sit there and listen and learn all about life from people who have no idea how to live it.”
― Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here’s a hint—ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn’t just the women. It’s the great male fantasy—all it takes is one dance to know that she’s the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know—this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don’t want a very long courtship. They want to know immediately.”
― Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”
― Francois Mauriac

“At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.”
― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“Opinions are like ugly children … despite it all you love your own.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“The problem with epiphanies is the next day they feel like they happened to someone else. Inspiration will get you nowhere in life.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“The architecture—the mind—is knitting together. It’s sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know something, while the secret is to create machines that don’t know something.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“Montana is the hostess, a pretty, pleasantly blank-looking high-school-age girl. It’s not profound blankness—just the vacancy of youth. A certain position of the head, a set of the eyes, all of which can be transformed by twenty-two or twenty-five or twenty-seven, her eyes sharper, head tilted down into life, ready for impact. She just needs something terrible to happen to her, and then needs to do something terrible to someone else. After that, she’s all set.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“If you want to be happy, be.”
― Leo Tolstory

“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“There is something about knowing you are not safe in sleep that gives a person bad dreams. The expectation of being woken every night — that feeling of insecurity and dread I remember carrying around with me as my marriage was drawing to a close, like a rotting smell I couldn’t find the source of, shit I didn’t know I stepped in. The subconscious starts sending messages: Be vigilant. Don’t relax. Here’s a boogeyman or two to keep your nerves on edge.”
― Lynn Coady, Watching You Without Me

“The iron that makes our blood red was made in the final moments before a star died. For all of us, then, our very lifeblood began with a spectacular death in a solar system.”
― Ziya Tong, The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World