Michael Roberti > Michael's Quotes

“The world is a grey place. A place of half-truths. Of half-wrongs and half-rights. Yet there are things worth fighting for, and they must be pursued with all our vigour and commitment. Half-measures achieve nothing.’ ‘What”
― Joe Abercrombie, Red Country

“Remember this well. That is as much as anyone can tell you; the rest you must learn for yourself. Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― John Piper, Desiring God, Revised Edition: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

“I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD” (Ezekiel 18:32).”
― John Piper, Desiring God, Revised Edition: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

“Even in the miserable guilt we feel over our beastlike insensitivity, the glory of God shines. If God were not gloriously desirable, why would we feel sorrowful for not feasting fully on His beauty?”
― John Piper, Desiring God, Revised Edition: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

“If we are Christ’s, then what befalls us is for His glory and for our good, whether it is caused by enzymes or by enemies.”
― John Piper, Desiring God, Revised Edition: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

“Vision without execution is hallucination.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

“Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Ogbenyealu is a common name for girls and you know what it means? ‘Not to Be Married to a Poor Man.’ To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at its best.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.”
― Octavia Butler

“One might almost say our approach has made matters worse,” observed Orso. A memory of Malmer drifted up, legs dangling from his cage as it swung with the breeze. “Perhaps we could make some gesture. A minimum wage? Improved working conditions? I heard a recent fire in a mill led to the deaths of fifteen child workers—” “It would be folly,” said Bayaz, his attention already back on the gardens, “to obstruct the free operation of the market.” “The market serves the interests of all,” offered the lord chancellor. “Unprecedented,” agreed the high justice. “Prosperity.” “No doubt the child workers would applaud it,” said Orso. “No doubt,” agreed Lord Hoff. “Had they not been burned to death.” “A ladder is of no use if all the rungs are at the top,” said Bayaz.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Trouble with Peace

“The palace was her home and home was not a matter of loving or hating; to leave it was to do violence to the past.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King

“As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“But Russian hopes and conceptions demand not that the Church should pass as from a lower into a higher type into the State, but, on the contrary, that the State should end by being worthy to become only the Church and nothing else. So be it! So be it!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You are completely misunderstanding it,” said Father Païssy sternly. “Understand, the Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is Rome and its dream. That is the third temptation of the devil.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“And while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of “as if,” therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Just as the people of the town had no horizontal curiosity about geography, they lacked any vertical curiosity about history.”
― Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

“This is what I’m trying to say. Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed. For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
― Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

“The world was, day by day, becoming a more convenient, and unromantic, place.”
― Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

“He reminded me of a butterfly drinking the last drop of nectar from a flower. A win-win for both the flower and the butterfly. The butterfly gets nutrition, the flower gets help pollinating. A mutually beneficial relationship, which harms no one. One of the wonderful things about the act of reading.”
― Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

“There are moments in some lives when it can truly be said that everything pivots and changes, when the branching paths show clearly, when one does make a choice.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan

“I didn’t have to ask. I chose to ask. To see who answered. There are things to be learned from questions, beyond the answers to the question.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan

“It is an old truth that men and women sometimes miss what they hate as much as what they love.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan

“They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test