Ahimsa > Ahimsa's Quotes

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
― Neal Stephenson

“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Heritage is a matter of the stories we choose to tell about our past, as well as the stories we overlook.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It's not, I'm pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“To be worth making at all, a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions.”
― Ted Simon

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept...

..I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“What good is power when you're too wise to use it?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The treacherous are ever distrustful.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.”
― China Mieville

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.”
― Lao Tzu