Ethan > Ethan's Quotes

“I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished . . . when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.”
― Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“As long as there is death, there is hope”
― Brother Theodore

“If you don't know where you are going any road can take you there”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“I have gazed into the abyss, and the abyss has gazed into me. And neither of us liked what we saw.”
― Brother Theodore

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Just because I do not accept the teachings of the devotaries does not mean I've discarded a belief in right and wrong."
"But the Almighty determines what is right!"
"Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality -- which answers only to my heart -- is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“We're all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglass.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“There is always a philosophy for lack of courage”
― Albert Camus

“My library was -- all libraries are -- a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real.”
― André Brink

“The earth laughs in flowers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks

“Stay curious, stay weird, stay kind and don't let anyone ever tell you you aren't smart or brave or worthy enough.”
― Alex Hirsch, Gravity Falls: Journal 3

“we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant-- life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it's not nice to go around constantly offending people.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“The master swordsman isn't interested in killing people. He only wants to perfect his art.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels

“You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
― Mark Twain