Francesca > Francesca's Quotes

“The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives. […]

Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen. […]

When they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got . . .” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to be Language.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.
But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing
these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections,
finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things.
I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I don’t think I am like other people. I mean on some deep fundamental level. It’s not just being half a twin and reading a lot and seeing fairies. It’s not just being outside when they’re all inside. I used to be inside. I think there’s a way I stand aside and look backwards at things when they’re happening which isn’t normal.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Logan Pearsall Smith

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010]

“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”
― William Golding

“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“The view changes from where you are standing.
Words can wound, and wounds can heal.
All of these things are true.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.”
― Ken Liu, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

“Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.”
― Ken Liu, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones