Laura McGinley > Laura's Quotes

“Here is a fish swimming around comfortably and (he thinks) unobtrusively, flicking here and there amongst the kelp and the plankton. Draw away for the long view and there’s the kicker: It’s a goldfish bowl.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“Question: If you put a psychologist in a room with a man who thinks he’s Napoleon and leave them there for a year (or ten or twenty), will you end up with two Skinner men or two guys with their hands in their shirts? Answer: Insufficient data.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“He was vaguely aware that he drank to forget. What made it rather pointless was that he couldn’t remember what it was he was forgetting anymore. In the end he just drank to forget about drinking.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Never build a dungeon you wouldn’t be happy to spend the night in yourself,” said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. “The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else’s poison—thinking you can cure them by sharing it—you will instead store it within you.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adiron dacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever—think of that wonderful Hudson Valley.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? —it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. We”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“These models—these mannequins—are perfectly professional, and he hates all professionalism. He is too young to have learned to hate himself yet, but that seed is already there; given time, it will grow, and bear bitter fruit. He”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Everyday took an age to go by, which was odd, because days plural went past like a stampede.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“It is generally thought, on those worlds where the mall lifeform has seeded, that people take the wire baskets away and leave them in strange and isolated places, so that squads of young men have to be employed to gather them together and wheel them back. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. In reality the men are hunters, stalking their rattling prey across the landscape, trapping them, breaking their spirit, taming them and herding them to a life of slavery. Possibly.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. There”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, “Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?” ***”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse.”
― Jennifer Worth, The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

“Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse.”
― Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

“Life is a series of cycles—each nothing but new people, new memories, and eventually, a new ending.”
― Kevin Hazzard, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

“When people had trouble of a magic kind, the kind that cops couldn’t or wouldn’t handle, they called the Mercenary Guild. If the job happened to fall into my territory, the Guild then called me.”
― Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites

“Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“gods were always demanding that their followers acted other than according to their true natures, and the human fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches. The”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then? But”
― George Orwell, 1984

“But you don’t even like being a Fool!” “I hate it. But that’s got nothing to do with it. If I’ve got to be a Fool, I’ll do it properly.” “That’s really stupid,” said Magrat. “Foolish, I’d prefer.” The”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Maybe we’re all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they’re extraordinary.”
― Lisa See, Shanghai Girls