melody > melody's Quotes

“An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.”
― Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“You must admit I have a right to live in a pigsty if I want.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal —carries the cross of the redeemer— not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven / The Dispossessed / The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”
― Mikhail Tal

“It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“You have my whole heart. You always did.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul”
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables

“You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“I'm cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they're going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.'

'Will you be all right?'

'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves