Eilish > Eilish's Quotes

“Rosemary took another sip of juice. Her head was already feeling better. ‘Does your name mean something in your language?’ ‘It does. I am “A Grove of Trees Where Friends Meet To Watch The Moons Align During A Sunset in Mid” . . . I’d guess you’d say “autumn.” Mind you, that’s just the first bit. It also includes my mother’s name and the town in which I was born, but I think I’ll leave it there, or else you’ll be listening to me translate all night.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“That’s not the same. What happened to you, to your species, it’s . . . it doesn’t even compare.’ ‘Why? Because it’s worse?’ She nodded. ‘But it still compares. If you have a fractured bone, and I’ve broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“The people we remember are the ones who decided how our maps should be drawn. Nobody remembers who built the roads.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Tresha. It was the thankful, humble, vulnerable feeling that came after someone saw a truth in you, something they had discovered just by watching, something that you did not admit often to yourself.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Humans’ preoccupation with ‘being happy’ was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Do not judge other species by your own social norms”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“I love learning. I love history. But there's history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It's not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes. -Tak”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“And seriously, anybody working in a job that doesn’t let you take a nap when you need to should get a new job.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“You are all desperate for purpose, even though you don’t have one. You’re animals, and animals don’t have a purpose. Animals just are. And there are a lot of intelligent - sentient, maybe - animals out there who don’t have a problem with that. They just go on breathing and mating and eating each other without a second thought. But the animals like you - the ones who make tools and build cities and itch to explore, you all share a need for purpose. For reason . That thinking worked well for you, once.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“If I'm nothing more than a tool, then I must have a purpose. Tools have purposes, right? But I'm more than that...I know that I'm more than a tool. I know I'm a person, even if the GC doesn't think so. I have to be a person, because I don't need a purpose and not having one drives me crazy.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“The only way to really appreciate your way is to compare it to somebody else's way. Figure out what you love, specifically. In detail. Figure out what you want to keep. Figure out what you want to change. Otherwise, it's not love. It's clinging to the familiar--to the comfortable--and that's a dangerous thing for us short-term thinkers to do. If you stay, stay because you want to, because you've found something here worth embodying, because you believe in it. Otherwise...well, there's no point in being here at all, is there?”
― Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few

“A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox -- the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death... I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself... I did not know who she was, the one waiting for me to start moving toward her. I was curious about her, all the same. I was eager to meet her.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“Whenever I've made a choice in my life, a real choice... I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.”
― Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors

“If a god is a thing that has absolute power over us, then in this world there are many. There are gods that we choose and gods that we can't avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us; there are dreams that become gods and nightmares that do, as well.”
― Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“you can’t tell a single thing about a person’s true character if you both want the same thing. That’s like a dog and a cat getting along because they both want to kill the mouse.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“When you dig just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, everyone's love life is original and interesting and nuanced and defies any easy definition.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“So, tattooing . . . you’ve got a picture in your mind, then you put it on your body. You make a hazy imagining into a tangible part of you. Or, to flip it around, you want a reminder of something, so you put it on your body, where it’s a real, touchable thing. You see the thing on your body, you remember it in your mind, then you touch it on your body, you remember why you got it, what you were feeling then, and so on, and so on. It’s a re-enforcing circle. You’re reminded that all these separate pieces are part of the whole that comprises you.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“How were you supposed to change- in ways both big and small- when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“It was as if June had given her a box—as if every parent gives their children a box—full of the things they carried. June had given her children this box packed to the brim with her own experiences, her own treasures and heartbreaks. Her own guilts and pleasures, triumphs and losses, values and biases, duties and sorrows. And Nina had been carrying around this box her whole life, feeling the full weight of it. But it was not, Nina saw just then, her job to carry the full box. Her job was to sort through the box. To decide what to keep, and to put the rest down. She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Real children do not go hoppity skip unless they are on drugs.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!'
IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.
'She's a child!' shouted Crumley.
IT'S EDUCATIONAL.
'What if she cuts herself?'
THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do.
And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find
herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather