Risa Isagba > Risa's Quotes

“You never know what you can achieve so long as you never stop trying.”
― Stephanie Thornton, The Secret History: A Novel of Empress Theodora

“Even though this was going to be the biggest act I had ever put on, I intended to play it as I always had—pure improvisation, all on impulse, with little more known than I would be playing the part of a countess.”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade

“this person saw Mrs. Gunness as “a maniac of the much-dreaded type that includes the White Chapel murderer.” It is “not money” that drives such killers “but the constantly growing appetite for blood, to cut deep and watch the blood flow, to dabble the hands in it, to revel in the odor of it.” One “distinguishing features of these criminals is their invariable use of the same methods in every case. Mrs. Gunness decapitated every one of her victims. In every case she severed the limbs. Always there was the maximum of mutilation.”[9]”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write ev’ry second you’re alive?
Ev’ry second you’re alive? Ev’ry second you’re alive?”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: The Revolution

“I ended that letter, 'There is nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy - nothing - try to remember that.' Looking back, I wonder at my naiveté. Some things in life ARE complete tragedies. Ted Bundy's story may well be one of them.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of Job with this verse on it:

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone.
And the face of the deep is frozen.

The he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away.
It was a dramatic gesture, but that was the way Shackleton wanted it. From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“I feel like a little kid, like a sorcerer, like the luckiest person alive. I am in space, weightless and getting here only took 8 minutes and 42 seconds.
Give or take a few thousand days of training.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

“Someone once said that youth is wasted on the young.* Not a bit of it. Only the young have the impulsive energy to tackle the impossible and enjoy it; the courage to follow their instincts and brave the new; the stamina to work all day, all night and all the next day without tiring. For the young everything is possible. None of us, twenty years later, could do the things we did in our youth. Though the vision burns still bright, the energy has gone.”
― Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End

“... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.”
― Richard Preston

“Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.”
― elizabeth gilbert

“When I was on the other side, my reply became, “I can’t imagine either, but I have no choice.” I”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Option B

“But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“A friend will help you move; a true friend will help you move a body. A friend will bail you out of jail; a true friend will be sitting beside you. Who”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade

“The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it?”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

“I knew how badly Obama had wanted Hillary Clinton to win the White House. He had campaigned tirelessly for her and, by some accounts, harder for her than any other president had for their hoped-for successor.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“In 1955, a little more than four years after leaving a TV studio in Hollywood, signals bearing the first sound and images of the I Love Lucy show passed Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. A half-century later, a scene with Lucy disguised as a clown sneaking into Ricky’s Tropicana Night Club was 50-plus light-years, or about 300 trillion miles, away. Since the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across and 1,000 light-years thick, and our solar system is near the middle of the galactic plane, this means in about AD 2450 the expanding sphere of radio waves bearing Lucy, Ricky, and their neighbors the Mertzes will emerge from the top and bottom of our galaxy and enter intergalactic space.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Pre-internet, it’s how I learned, and it learned me good. I know deep wisdoms, such as, ‘If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while – their wife might catch fire.’ (Jane Eyre)”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“Years ago, Re had raged against humans for violating Ma’at, so he had sent Hathor to destroy mankind. She transformed into the lion goddess Sekhmet and Egypt’s fields ran red with the blood of her rampage. Seeing this, Re realized his mistake and ordered Sekhmet to stop, but she was too gone with bloodlust to listen. Knowing he had to halt her some other way, Re stained seven thousand jugs of beer with pomegranate juice and poured the red liquid into her path. Believing the beer to be blood, Sekhmet gorged herself and passed out in a drunken stupor. When she awoke, her bloodlust had passed and she returned to being Hathor. Thus the goddesses of love and violence shared a common history.”
― Stephanie Thornton, Daughter of the Gods: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

“Within the next few years, SpaceX expects to cut its price to at least one-tenth that of its rivals.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

“Each of my advisers undoubtedly had their own political opinions and views. They were human beings, after all. They also had spouses, friends, or family members who had their own points of view as well. But I didn’t know what those views were. I never heard anyone on our team—not one—take a position that seemed driven by their personal political motivations. And more than that: I never heard an argument or observation I thought came from a political bias. Never.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“Hope was all that stood between them and death.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

“you’re only as good as your word,” and there’s no better way to say it.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“The club also had the custom of sending robed members to kidnap visiting celebrities and steal them away in a black coach with covered windows, all without saying a word.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth.”
― Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer

“That day at school I prayed for the world to end.”
― Dave Pelzer, A Child Called "It"

“one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“On Spending the Night at a Friend’s House for the First Time “Try not to piss yourself.”
― Justin Halpern, Sh*t My Dad Says

“Traveling is more fun-- hell, life is more fun--if you can treat it as a series of impulses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.”
― Don Miguel Ruiz