Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

“A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

“I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

“Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

“I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“ You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash?
But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“...what one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible...”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“There is an intense relationship between proximate objects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as for the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God.”
― László Krasznahorkai

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
― Edgar Mitchell