jo > jo 's Quotes

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

“The movement of the wheel is relentless. All changes; all moves on.”
― Juliet Marillier , Son of the Shadows

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“I could not bear his expression. That look said, this is a long good-bye, yet not time enough. I have no aptitude for this. I cannot learn this. I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.”
― Juliet Marillier, Son of the Shadows

“If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.”
― Cindy Brandner, Where Butterflies Dream

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

“To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based
on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God
there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that
there is a God, there would be no religion…”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“You risked much, to give your love to such a one.
I stared at him. Love?
Did you not know, until now, when you must say goodbye?”
― Juliet Marillier, Daughter of the Forest

“If disliking Richard be grounds for accusing a man of conspiracy, I daresay you could implicate half of Christendom in this so-called plot. Richard endears himself easiest to those who've yet to meet him.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Here Be Dragons

“None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.”
― Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

“Kneeling on St. Mary’s stone floor she had envisioned the candles and the cold, but not Lady Imeyne, waiting for Roche to make a mistake in the mass, not Eliwys or Gawyn or Rosemund. Not Father Roche, with his cutthroat’s face and worn-out hose.

She could never in a hundred years, in seven hundred and thirty-four years, have imagined Agnes, with her puppy and her naughty tantrums, and her infected knee. I’m glad I came, she thought. In spite of everything.”
― Connie Willis , Doomsday Book

“When I queried the universe as to whether there was an invisible sign out there that had denoted me as a flophouse for the world’s strays, she asked me if I considered her such. She has not learned the art of coyness, therefore I knew it was an honest question and so I answered it in kind. “No, you are not a stray, Pamela. You are my friend.” “Thank you,” she said back to me, with the grave look that penetrates right through to my soul. What I did not add was that it is myself who is the stray, and that someday she will be old enough to know that. For now I am grateful for her ignorance.”
― Cindy Brandner, Flights of Angels

“The goddamn Irish, they say, all they know is hate. Well I ask ye, Corporal, who taught it to us, who made sure it was bred deep into the bone an’ blood of us?”
― Cindy Brandner , Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

“Major, to what extent did you act upon your feelings for Miss LaRoux?"

"Medium."

"Excuse me?"

"How am I supposed to answer that question?”
― Amie Kaufman, Meagan Spooner, These Broken Stars

“Automatically, as it had begun to do in these situations, her brain separated itself, like taking a box out of a box, leaving the original in its place and moving the latter over parallel to the original, though slightly askew. Photographer versus wife, picture taker versus the woman who wanted to scream in the street, who wanted to take the rifles these olive boys wore slung so casually over shoulders and narrow hips and turn them on their owners. And so the entire scene, (five minutes in real time, eternity on celluloid) laid itself out for her in freeze frame. Click, Casey cuffed now to the side of the lorry, morning light washing him over rose and silver and gold, half-naked and barefoot in the street; an Irish man in an Irish street in the twentieth century, hard to countenance and yet there for the clicking, there for the taking. Take the shot, take the picture, leave the pain, it interferes with the work, work now, bleed on the weekends, in the nights, in the quiet, that’s what Lucas had taught her.”
― Cindy Brandner, Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

“He touched me. We kissed and we held hands sometimes. It was proper. Do you think I should have been with him in that way?" "Hell, no. He's probably not capable." "He's married now. They have children." "Must be Catholic." "What makes you say that?" "Virgin births.”
― Ellen O'Connell, Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold

“I am the servant of the sword,” he said. “I obey the will of the—great god, woman, put on some clothes!”
― T. Kingfisher, Swordheart

“One of the grimmer realizations of Sarkis’s youth had been the discovery that knowing you were being an ass did not actually stop you from continuing to be an ass.”
― T. Kingfisher, Swordheart

“How do you live again, knowing what waits for you in the end?”
― Amie Kaufman, These Broken Stars

“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир

“Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Drops Dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind