Amber > Amber's Quotes

“You lazy, floor banana motherf*****”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. "Help!" she screams to a sky full of crows. "He's not actually from Europe!”
― Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories

“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”
― Lemony Snicket

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“Emotions had welled close to the surface, and she thought her heart had never felt so full as it did standing next to the defiled grave of a whore while lunatics sang the national anthem.”
― Mindy McGinnis, A Madness So Discreet

“Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!”
― David Sedaris , Me Talk Pretty One Day

“The amount a person can spare is relative; the value of generosity is not.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“We have hugged each other maybe three or four times - on birthdays,very likely, and clumsily. We have never hugged in moments of grief.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!

“[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay married to a mate that cracked?

"Anything interesting happen at work today, honeybunch?"

"Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Writings

“Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!

“If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Heartless it may be, but headless it ain't. I've never claimed to be nice, just to be sensible.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“American humorist Kin Hubbard said , "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be". The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“It's just a bow and arrow, but it's not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, but history takes the laugh out of many things. If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, so is the sweep of disease laden dust that wipes out whole cities, so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls then thousand miles away and kills a million people.”
― Clifford D. Simak

“By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, an Operation Other Than War, as Pentagon forces called them, could go on indefinitely, sort of on autopilot - without real political costs or consequences, or much civilian notice. We'd gotten used to it.

By 2001, the ability of a president to start and wage military operations without (or even in spite of) Congress was established precedent.”
― Rachel Maddow, Drift

“Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“When civilians are not asked to pay any price, it's easy to be at war - not just to intervene in a foreign land in the first place, but to keep on fighting there. The justifications for staying at war don't have to be particularly rational or cogently argued when so few Americans are making the sacrifice that it takes to stay.”
― Rachel Maddow, Drift

“I guess he's used to suspicious people with crappy tempers. Or maybe I've never seemed as normal as I thought.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“They thought she knew what she was doing and she made their faith hers”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!