Teddy > Teddy's Quotes

“There's no way out of this, it's stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.”
― Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie

“It was then I truly realised the whale is no more a fish than I am. So much blood. This was not like the fish on the quay, fresh caught, lying flipping and flopping, death on a simmer. This was a fierce, boiling death. She died thrashing blindly in a slick of gore, full of pain and fury, gnashing her jaws, beating her tail, spewing lumps of slime and half-digested fish that fell stinking about us. It was vile. So much strength dies slowly.”
― Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else.”
― Lemony Snicket, The End

“Olaf: Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else”
― Lemony Snicket, The End

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”
― Patti Smith

“Happiness, in other words, is a temporary glitch in evolution.”
― Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society

“She’d read more than was healthy, hundreds of books every year. Some of them she read twice, or even three times, before returning them. Some of them she would check out again after letting them sink in a while. She’d thought at the time that books were at their best when you’d read them two or three times.”
― Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“By autistic standards, the “normal” brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
― Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables

“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Life's great happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“That was the look of somebody resigned to being the monster they knew they were.”
― Caitlin Starling, The Luminous Dead

“It’s not that I hate men,” the woman says. “I’m just terrified of them. And I’m okay with that fear.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“I took a step toward her. 'It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,' I said.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories