Shell > Shell's Quotes

“Don't be so humble - you are not that great.”
― Golda Meir

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

“We are not all born at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.”
― Mary Austin

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. ”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“So much of what was best in life went unnoticed in the moments you had it. The”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman

“Everybody counts, or nobody counts.”
― Michael Connelly

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“ Every path is the right path. Everything could've been anything else. And it would have just as much meaning.”
― Mr. Nobody

“My life is a reading list.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.”
― Harlan Ellison

“Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child”
― Victor LaValle, The Changeling

“One of the hardest and truest things a grown-up learns is that sometimes it’s not okay.”
― Christopher Buehlman, Those Across the River

“This was the state he strove for: relatively happy. Happiness could easily tip over into its antithesis and sadness was hard to overcome. One could maintain a fairly continuous state of relative happiness if one took it easy.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Old Dreams Die

“It is perverse that love should be subject to the same conditions as the mortal flesh. That it should wither away and die with it.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Old Dreams Die

“Some righteous men and women yet held faith, but they were scattered so far that none could see the other’s light, and it seemed the darkness had no end.”
― Christopher Buehlman, Between Two Fires

“No one will read that book again because that is the nature of most books: read once, if at all, then shelved with the words locked inside.”
― Conner Habib, Hawk Mountain

“We destroy the present while forgetting the past.”
― Jonathan Janz, The Dismembered