Tim Martin > Tim's Quotes

“Labor-saving technology was supposed to give us more leisure time, but a greater percentage of our waking hours is spent in work or work-related tasks than ever before, as we spin like squirrels in exercise cages, desperate to keep current with change and therefore employable.”
― Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers

“You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“It’s not just a person’s present that dies when they die, when they are murdered or drowned or a giant rock falls on their head. It’s the past, too, all the memories that belonged only to them, the things they thought and never said. And all those possible futures, all the ways that life might have turned out. Past and future and present all burn up together like a bundle of sticks. Most”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“Nobody is the kind of person they used to be.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
― John Steinbeck

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, Valis

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the real world it is meaningless to doubt existence; the doubt itself demonstrates the existence of the doubter.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“The Manhattan District bore no relation to the industrial or social life of our country; it was a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands of secrets. It had a peculiar sovereignty, one that could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“I will defend pumpkin until the day I die. It's delicious. It's healthy. I don't understand the backlash. How did pumpkin become this embarrassing thing to love but bacon is still the cool flavor to add to everything? I don't have anything against bacon; just don't come after pumpkin like it's a crime to love an American staple.”
― Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody

“And having to fight for the thing you want doesn't mean you deserve it any less.”
― Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The radio played “Groove Is in the Heart,” which is a radio’s way of saying it couldn’t care less about the mood of a scene.”
― Edgar Cantero, Meddling Kids

“It never pays to walk blindly. Especially not in your own castle where familiarity hides so much - even when we have the eyes to see.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“In a duel, man to man, sword against sword, it can be a lack of skill that gets you killed. Often as not, though, it'll be a matter of luck, or if it goes on too long, then it'll be the man who tires first that tends to die.
In the end it's about staying power. They should put that on headstones, "Got tired.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“Cowards should be treated with respect. Cowards best know how to hurt. Corner one at your peril.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon, and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his own utter helplessness.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“If you’re going to be mad, she heard her father say, then use it, and don’t be used by it.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2