Al > Al's Quotes

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“History repeats, but science reverberates.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'
What is it then?'
It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“So I want to ask you a hypothetical question.

My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“It's in silence we know ourselves, vampire. It's in stillness we hear the questions that truly matter, scratching like baby birds on the eggshells of our eyes. Who am I? What do I want? What have I become? Truth is, the questions you hear in the quiet are always the most terrifying, because most people never take the time to listen to the answers. They dance. And they sing. And they fight. And they fuck. And they drown, filling their gullets with piss and their lungs with smoke and their heads with shit so they never have to learn the truth of who the fuck they are. Put a man in a room for a hundred years with a thousand books, and he’ll know a million truths. Put him in a room for a year with silence, and he’ll know himself.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire

“My friends are the hill I die on.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire

“...there’s just no one with more to prove than the boy at the bottom of the pile. You feed a man your table scraps, he grows hungry long before he grows thin. And hunger can turn pups into wolves, and kittens into fucking lions.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire

“We only die if we are forgotten. Burn bright. Burn brief. But burn.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Damned

“To hate the thing that is completing you. To love the thing that is destroying you. What perfect suffering. What hell divine.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Damned

“Hope is for fools, Historian.” Gabriel met the vampire’s eyes. “Hope gets you killed. Hope walks into the fire. Faith leaps over it. I didn’t hope Dior was alive. I believed it.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Damned

“That's the way to wisdom, vampire. The wise man learns more from his enemies than the fool from his friends, but even the fool can learn if his friends are willing to call him one.

Surround yourself with folk who confront you. If you're not being challenged, you're not learning anything. If you're the smartest man in the room, you're in the wrong fucking room.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Damned

“Mantis shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions: frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I always forget that trying to reason with the unreasonable is... unreasonable.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I'm trying every day to face myself. The results vary, but the attempts are consistent.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“I think every parent has some moments when they say to themselves, If I could take my child’s pain away and make it mine, I would make it mine. But I have no right to take your pain away, because it’s yours.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

“it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.

The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Kindness is an essential part of practice—and that starts by being kind to yourself.”
― Matthew Sockolov, Practicing Mindfulness: 75 Essential Meditations to Reduce Stress, Improve Mental Health, and Find Peace in the Everyday

“Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days...What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue in it after failure?...Anyone can believe in someone, or something that always succeeds...But failure...ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value. Sometimes we just have to wait long enough...then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing...There's always another secret.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“Our belief is often strongest when it should be weakest. That is the nature of hope.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“Many are the strange chances of the world,' said Mithrandir, 'and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“Villain,” she said lightly.
“Angel,” he retorted.”
― India Holton, The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love

“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“But moral attention is not a finite resource.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters