Alex > Alex's Quotes

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“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

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
― Stephen King

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Who am I? Who am I?”
“You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs. You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen. You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way. You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it. You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again. You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”

"And who are you?"
"I'm Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Am I weird?"

"Yeah. But so what? Everybody's weird.”
― Stephen King, The Body

“The withering ember of dreams. Finances. Aging parents. The future. We are promised the world, but by the time we hit thirty, life knocks us over the head with a baseball bat like we’re a fucking piñata at a gender reveal party and we’re struck by the futility of it all: our finances are indelibly fucked, our dreams are scattered ash and the future has been salted.”
― Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce

“I admit it, given a choice, with a handful of exceptions, I tend to prefer the company of animals to the company of people. Animals are honest—there’s not a hint of pretense about them, they just unapologetically are who they are, and their capacity to love and be loved outshines ours by about a million.”
― Kelly Bishop, The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir

“Medical specialists flinging procedures and prescriptions at you—betahistines and SSRIs, SNRIs, benzos and CNS depressants, DNRIs, rTMS, ECT, CBT, DBT—if the list seems inexhaustive, it’s because it is, all sorts of fancy-colour pills that nuke your libido and make your limbs tense up with a writhing athetosis. Besieged by waves of nausea, I have never wanted to kill myself more than when I was on sertraline.”
― Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce

“So close you are to seeing the truth, the Grand Cyclops croons. Give over your anger. Let us show you how to wield it. How to make you strong. Without fear of your enemies or mercy. Do not flee from it. Embrace it. Who is to blame for the hate that hate made?”
― P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout

“The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“This is for everybody going through tough times - believe me been there, done that. But everyday above ground is a good day, remember that.”
― Pitbull

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Self is.
Self is body and bodily
perception. Self is thought, memory,
belief. Self creates. Self destroys.
Self learns, discovers, becomes.
Self shapes. Self adapts. Self
invents its own reasons for being.
To shape God, shape Self.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Here we are— Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind, God, Shaping God. Consider— We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Gloria had always found it silly that so much effort went into trying to send humans to space instead of learning how to get along on Earth.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory