Pat Murphy > Pat's Quotes

“A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“People's capacity for turning dogmatic stupidity into political movements never ceased to amaze me. We've knocked off 99.9% of the human race and somehow the crazies still manage to survive. It just defies the odds.”
― Dennis E. Taylor, We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

“At one time, we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy. Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life. …”
― Dennis E. Taylor, We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“The thing is, the deepest truths always sound a little trite. Because we all know them, and feel foolish being reminded.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Wind and Truth

“nothing is easier to sell someone than the story they want to hear.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Wind and Truth

“The dirty secret is that all governments are quietly republics—the voting is simply done with the sword or with coin. Everyone conveniently neglects to tell the lower class that it’s their coin, and their lack of swords.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Wind and Truth

“If hope doesn’t mean anything to you when you lose, then it wasn’t ever a virtue in the first place. It took me a long time to learn that, and I finally did so from the writings of a man who lost every belief he thought he had, then started over new.” “Sounds like someone wise,” Syl said. “Oh, Sazed is among the best. Hope I get to meet him someday.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Wind and Truth

“You think that kid who starved didn’t want to eat? You think her parents didn’t want to escape the ravages of war badly enough? You think if they’d had more Passion, the cosmere would have saved them? How convenient to believe that people are poor because they didn’t care enough about being rich. That they just didn’t pray hard enough. So convenient to make suffering their own fault, rather than life being unfair and birth mattering more than aptitude. Or storming Passion.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Wind and Truth

“A virtue is something that is valuable even if it gives you nothing. A virtue persists without payment or compensation. Positive thinking is great. Vital. Useful. But it has to remain so even if it gets you nothing. Belief, truth, honor … if these exist only to get you something, you’ve missed the storming point.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Wind and Truth

“Perhaps the question isn’t ‘What use is art?’ ” Wit mused. “Perhaps even that simple question misses the point. It’s like asking the use of having hands, or walking upright, or growing hair. Art is part of us, Kaladin. That’s the use; that’s the reason. It exists because on some fundamental level we need it. Art exists to be made.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Wind and Truth

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre