Vintagebooklvr > Vintagebooklvr's Quotes

“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Does the world really need another long essay on environmental archaeology and freshwater mollusks? Well, it's going to get one, whether it likes it or not.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“Clever isn't the same as sensible," said Susan, "and they do say that if you wish to walk the path to wisdom then for your first step you must become as a small child."

"Do you think they've heard about the second step?"

Susan sighed. "Probably not, but sometimes they fall over it while they're running around shouting.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we’re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it's monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play?

Do you have soul?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy, the history of a planet, the history of a person is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of glittering, occasionally peaceful light to help you follow along. Cue the music. Cue the dancers. Cue tomorrow.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light-years.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera

“I mean't we're not going to be intimidated by the certain prospect of complete and utter failure, master.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Like I would be out-lawyered by a doorkeeping functionary," Hilsom muttered.”
― Import of Intrigue

“In fact this bad baronet died true to the conditions of his kind--mysteriously in his library, at midnight, while a great deal of snow was falling.”
― Michael Innes, What Happened At Hazlewood

“Quite simply, before anyone did anything Poe did everything. Or almost everything.”
― Tony Medawar, Bodies from the Library :Thirteen Lost Tales of Mystery and Suspense

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“He'll want to know that the burglar, alias the vanishing saint, came back here tonight as a phantom priest.”
― M.V. Carvey

“The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a single motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is.”
― Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

“She was always acting cold and distant with boys to cover up the fact that she was shy inside and didn't know quite how to act.”
― Winifred E. Wise, The Wishing Year

“One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”
― Raymond Chandler

“What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“I don’t know what kind of women you’re used to, but my mother didn’t raise a worker bee. She raised a queen.” I stare at him without smiling. “And I don’t give away the honey for free.”
― J.T. Geissinger, Beautifully Cruel

“Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.”
― Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth

“...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Heaven forbid you do anything -cliché-, Mr. English-Professor-in-Training," says Dodger. "You might find a single cliché is a gateway drug to tweed jackets and khaki slacks, and the next thing you know, you're teaching Kerouac and making eyes at that cute undergrad in the front row who makes you think about fucking all of Middle America in one triumphant go.”
― Seanan McGuire, Middlegame

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling