Jess > Jess's Quotes

“Okay. Morality in a nutshell. Don't hurt people if you can avoid it. Don't steal stuff unless you're starving or it's really, really important. Work hard. Pay your bills. Try to help others. Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved. If you screwed it up, you need to see it gets fixed. And don't eat anything that talks. If it doesn't fall under one of those categories, just do the best you can.”
― Ursula Vernon, Digger, Volume One

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Times like these I wonder if I ever been happy. From the start there's been a film of dingy on my days.... I see some folks walk easy and carry peace on their shoulders, but I been chained to a iron life.”
― Leah Weiss, If the Creek Don't Rise

“Failure is rarely a conscious decision and it’s often out of our control, determined by things like physics and circumstance and other people. What we can always control, however, is our reaction to failure.”
― Kevin Hearne, Shattered

“There was something about poverty that was a little like war. Either you had been there or you hadn't, and it wasn't really possible to explain it to anyone who hadn't.”
― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Missing people in our lives are like wounds we reopen with thoughts.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hunted

“You killed my father,” he snorted in a basso profundo rumble. “Prepare to die!” “Inigo Montoya? Is that you?”
― Kevin Hearne, Hexed

“Whether you made your choices with your eyes open or closed, they’re made. It’s not time to regret them; it’s time to live with the consequences.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Queen of Blood

“Saint Lassie smiles upon me! It's Coyote, with a bag of goodies.”
― Kevin Hearne, Tricked

“If we limited loving to just the sane, undamaged people, the next generation would have about three people in it and presumably humanity would die out shortly afterward.”
― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace

“When there's blood involved, you always use every advantage you have to make sure it's theirs that spills and not yours. If you want to feel guilty about taking unfair advantage afterward, you go ahead and feel that shit. But live to feel it.”
― Kevin Hearne, Trapped

“Luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Relief feels like happiness, if you don’t know the difference.”
― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace

“For me, the times I always regret are missed opportunities to say farewell to good people, to wish them long life and say to them in all sincerity, "You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress." Too often I never get to say that when it should be said. Instead, I leave them with the equivalent of a "Later, dude!" only to discover there would be no later for us.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hammered

“But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with our friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, then the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you
chew on the next one.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hammered

“ 'So what happens next?'

'Everybody dies, and the people who don't get married.'

'Like any other story, then.' ”
― Sarah Monette, The Tempering of Men

“I fear that I am not the best possible person for this, but I am the best possible person available at this time, which is much the same thing.”
― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace

“We should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“but greatness is in the act of creation and not necessarily in the finished product. Creating is the yin to the yang of our consumption and the doorway to beauty that we all want to walk through. Creating is how I tell the world I love it.” I”
― Kevin Hearne, Hunted

“Wooo!’ he said, slamming his shot glass down and coughing a bit. ‘That’s good stuff.’
I agreed heartily. ‘Shall we do another one?’ I asked.
‘Oh no,’ Jesus said quietly, his eyes growing round. ‘This is one of those situations where I have to stop and ask myself, what would I do?”
― Kevin Hearne, Hammered

“rooted is to say, here am I nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing.”
― Kevin Hearne, Shattered

“Goblin tea resembles a nice cup of Earl Grey in much the same way that a catfish resembles the common tabby. They share a name, but one is a nice thing to curl up with on a rainy afternoon, and the other is found in the muck at the bottom of polluted rivers and has bits of debris sticking to it.”
― T. Kingfisher

“...it's survival of the fittest, not the strongest or the biggest.”
― Ali Shaw, The Trees

“Atticus:"Damn it, Jim, I'm a Druid not a Physicist!”
― Kevin Hearne, Trapped

“She didn't go all fangirl on anyone, but I suspect that's only because none of them bore the slightest resemblance to Nathan Fillion.”
― Kevin Hearne, Trapped

“That's right, there's free beer in Irish paradise. Everyone's jealous.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hammered

“He will spit you and roast you with rosemary, and we will all sample your flesh tonight. Tomorrow you will be shat out into the snow.

Your diplomacy is bold and edgy, sir.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hammered

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

[Adams submitted and signed the Treaty of Tripoli, 1797]”
― John Adams, Thoughts on government applicable to the present state of the American colonies.: Philadelphia, Printed by John Dunlap, M,DCC,LXXXVI.