Insightful Quotes

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

~ Joseph Campbell

Young, animated, entirely off your guard, and thoughtless of consequences, Imagination took the reins; and Reason, slow-paced, though sure-footed, was unequal to the race of so eccentric and flighty a companion. How rapid was then my Evelina's progress through those regions of fancy and passion whither her new guide conducted her!-She saw Lord Orville at a ball,-and he was the most amiable of men! -She met him again at another,-and he had every virtue under Heaven!

~ Fanny Burney

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence, the question is what you can make people believe that you have done.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when i also didn't have to worry about money.' —Steve Jobs

~ Walter Isaacson

Love is about filling up the space, not making more holes.

~ Sara San Angelo

A man might desire something for a moment, while a larger part of him rejects it. You'll need to learn to judge people by their actions, not their thoughts.

~ Helene Wecker

One must not permit oneself excesses, except with persons whom one wishes soon to leave.

~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

What you are to me is the guy that I’ve been madly in love with since sixth grade. You’re the guy I think about every night when I’m in bed by myself. You’re the one who doesn’t want me but insists on keeping me tied so close that I can’t have anyone else, who keeps one hand on my collar and the other hand up his girlfriend’s skirt. And I can’t do it anymore!” ~ Jordy

~ Eli Easton

Mason knew what it was like to say things you didn’t mean, to just have them vomit out, and then feel that crushing ache when you realized you could never pull them back.

~ Dan Krokos

The difference between a good golf shot and a bad one is the same as the difference between a beautiful and a plain woman --a matter of millimetres.

~ Ian Fleming

God lures us into marriage through love and sex and loneliness, or simply the fact that someone finally paid attention - all those reasons that you got married in the first place. It doesn't really matter, he'll do whatever it takes. He lures us into marriage and then he uses it to transform us.

~ John Eldredge

...the more of a fool a man is, the less he cares to look like one

~ Joe Ambercrombie

You make yourself too hard, you make yourself brittle too. Crack once, crack all to pieces

~ Joe Ambercrombie

As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.

~ André Aciman

I hand over a lot of things when I'm home. Mom tells me she doesn't like my shirt I want to buy, and I hand it over. Not the shirt itself, but my wish for that shirt. I want to watch one television show and she wants to watch another one -I hand that over too. It's easier that way. I even hand over my toenails when she asks. But I think sometimes you need to put a thing in a box -even if the box is inside your head -and store it away for yourself.

~ Gin Phillips

I was drowning that times, but when I saw those eyes of yours, my body learned how to swim.

~ Kent Ian N. Cny

My dear Copperfield,” he replied. “To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail which they involve. Even in our professional correspondence,” said Mr. Micawber, glancing at some letters he was writing, “the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression. Still, it is a great pursuit! A great pursuit!

~ Charles Dickens

In space you don't stop.

~ Christopher Carosa

Together they listed the people they had known who had died on the mountains. A bleak conversation to have, thought Margrét, but there was some comfort in talking about death aloud, as though in naming things, you could prevent them from happening.

~ Hannah Kent

Life is not about how long you live or how much you experience. Life is about how you choose to live it and what you experience.

~ Marlene Hansen

I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.

~ Charlie Chaplin

Better foolish and honest than clever and false.

~ Paula Brackston

For me, the times I always regret are missed opportunities to say farewell to good people, to wish them long life and say to them in all sincerity, You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress. Too often I never get to say that when it should be said. Instead, I leave them with the equivalent of a Later, dude! only to discover there would be no later for us.

~ Kevin Hearne

...This is a place of learning where very few learn anything of value. That you, who have courage and intelligence, are held in contempt by most of your kind here because you have no sorcery... I have seen you protect others, though they consider you to be weaker than they. I have seen a very few decent people, like the boy we took from the tower. I have seen women trade pleasure for coin to feed their children, and others do the same so that they could ignore their children while making themselves foolish with wines and powders. I have seen men who labor as long as the sun is up go home to wives who hold them in contempt for never being there. I have seen men beat and use those whom they should protect, even their own children. I have seen your kind place others of their own in slavery. I have seen them fighting to be free of the same. I have seen men of the law betray it, men who hate the law be kind. I have seen gentle defenders, sadistic healers, creators of beauty scorned while craftsmen of destruction are worshiped. Your Kind, Aleran, are the most vicious and gentle, most savage and noble, most treacherous and loyal, most terrifying and fascinating creatures I have ever seen.

~ Jim Butcher

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

~ John Edgar Wideman

There’s nothing you could do to make me any more or less gay, Dad. It’s who I am.”“It’s not who you are. It’s part of who you are, but it’s not who you are. You’re so much more than just that, and I’m proud of you. All of you. ~ Lucas' Father

~ Madison Parker

I told her that I can't be doing with the Wonder part of these trips, but she said it should be the icing on the cake... I've never liked wedding cake due to the amount of icing, but then imagine a wedding cake without it; just a dark, stodgy, horrible dry sponge. The icing covers up the mess, and that's how I feel about most of the Wonders. They use them to get people to visit a place that you probably wouldn't think about visiting.

~ Karl Pilkington

I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan

~ George Orwell

We believe people with Passion CAN change the World for the Better. -Steve Jobs

~ Steve Jobs

There's some ill planet reigns:I must be patient till the heavens lookWith an aspect more favourable. Good my lords,I am not prone to weeping, as our sexCommonly are; the want of which vain dewPerchance shall dry your pities: but I haveThat honourable grief lodged here which burnsWorse than tears drown: beseech you all, my lords,With thoughts so qualified as your charitiesShall best instruct you, measure me; and soThe king's will be perform'd!

~ William Shakespeare

Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.

~ Frank Herbert

Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox—finally irregulationary.

~ Jack Vance

There are times, Kruppe murmurs, when celibacy born of sad deprivation becomes a boon, nay, a source of great relief.

~ Steven Erikson

Only learning oneself better, and understanding one’s place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.

~ N.k. Jemisin

He who least likes courting favour, ought also least to think of resenting neglect; to feel wounded at being refused a distinction can only arise from an overweening appetite to have it.

~ Plutarch

But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practise and exercise. We are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to practice, and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation which we look at, but by the statement of the fact creates a moral purpose which we form.

~ Plutarch

That's what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don't want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there's no way to do that. In order to believe in a thing you've got to carry it with you. You can't carry the Earth, or a man, in your pocket. I want a way to do that, carry things with me always, so I can believe in them. How clumsy to have to go to all the trouble of going out and bringing in something terribly physical to prove something. I hate physical things because they can be left behind and become impossible to believe in them.

~ Ray Bradbury

If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It’s called a lobotomy.

~ Kathryn Schultz

So long as he was personally present, [Alcibiades] had the perfect mastery of his political adversaries; calumny only succeeded in his absence.

~ Plutarch