Maanu > Maanu's Quotes

“Curiouser and curiouser!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“It's just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.'
'Right, it's primarily his hotness,' I said.
'It can be sort of blinding,' he said.
'It actually did blind our friend Isaac,' I said.
'Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?'
'You cannot.'
'It is my burden, this beautiful face.'
'Not to mention your body.'
'Seriously, don't even get me started on my hot bod. You don't want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace's breath away,' he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

“How could Van Gogh have painted such a thing in 1889? Did he, having
suffered a second breakdown, truly leap across five centuries and see the sight
before them using only his spirit and delirious consciousness? Or, maybe it was
the opposite: He had seen the future, and the sight of this Last Judgment had
caused his breakdown and eventual suicide.”
― Cixin Liu, Three-Body Problem Series Collection - the Dark Forest, Death's End

“The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand
as their thoughts.”
― Cixin Liu, Three-Body Problem Series Collection - the Dark Forest, Death's End

“Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival.”
― Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth

“You are standing at the foot of the mountain. We are all always at the foot. The speed of light is the foot of a mountain; the three dimensions of space are the foot of a mountain. You are imprisoned in the deep gorge of light-speed and three- dimensional space. Does it not feel... cramped?”
― Cixin Liu, The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

“I work in a building that hosts various organizations and charities working for
global justice. Some focus on Western Sahara; some on Palestine; others on
torture, Latin America, or Africa. It is a good environment to work in,
surrounded by people who believe in a fairer and better society, and who have
decided to act on their beliefs and dedicate their lives to trying to change the
world. Sounds utopian, maybe. But the important word here is probably not the
one you are thinking of. It’s trying. Trying and trying again. Never stopping.
That is a victory in itself.”
― Frank Barat, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Since the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with
neoliberalism, it has become especially important to identify the dangers of
individualism. Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism,
repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also
attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist
individualism. Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his
accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by the men and women
who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic
individual. A similar process has attempted to disassociate Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very
heart of the mid-twentieth-century US freedom movement. It is essential to resist
the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people
today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding
community of struggle.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“There are vast numbers of people behind bars in the
United States—some two and a half million—and imprisonment is increasingly
used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism,
poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. These issues are never
seriously addressed. It is only a matter of time before people begin to realize that the prison is a false solution”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even
mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people.
Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison;
one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so
much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism—
I mean, the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name. Feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses, and institutions, and identities, and ideologies that we often tend to consider separately. But it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories “women” and “gender.” And, feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions.
Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about
things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear
to naturally belong together.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The Black American freedom struggle was inspired in part by the South African freedom struggle. In fact, I can remember growing up in the most segregated city in the country, Birmingham, Alabama, and learning about South Africa because Birmingham was known as the Johannesburg of the South. Dr. Martin Luther King was inspired by Gandhi to
engage in nonviolent campaigns against racism. And in India, the Dalits, formerly known as untouchables and other people who’ve been struggling against the caste system have been inspired by the struggles of Black Americans. More recently, young Palestinians have organized Freedom Rides, recapitulating the Freedom Rides of the 1960s by boarding segregated buses in the occupied territory of Palestine and being arrested as the Black and white Freedom Riders were in the sixties. They announced their project to be the Palestinian Freedom
Riders.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that's how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests that there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It seems impossible to live without hurting people.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“What if there was never a way? What if I am . . . trapped?’
‘So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.’

‘I just don’t understand life,’ sulked Nora.

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The primitive human brain was obviously successful because we as a species endured and are now the dominant life-form on earth. But despite our evolved complicated cognitive abilities, the original primitive brain functions didn’t go away. If anything, they became more important; having language
and reasoning skills doesn’t really amount to much if you keep dying from simple things like forgetting to eat or wandering off cliffs.”
― Dean Burnett, Dean Burnett Collection 3 Books Set

“It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline