Introduction Quotes

“My name is Herondale," the boy said cheerfully. "William Herondale, but everyone calls me Will. Is this really your room? Not very nice, is it?" He wandered toward the window, pausing to examine the stacks of books on her bedside table, and then the bed itself. He waved a hand at the ropes. "Do you often sleep tied to the bed?”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“My name is Percy Jackson.
I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.
Am I a troubled kid?
Yeah. You could say that.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in the Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me........”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Call me Ishmael.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Kitten, this is my best mate, Charles, but you can call him Spade. Charles, this is Cat, the woman I’ve been telling you about. You can see for yourself that everything I’ve said is…an understatement.”
― Jeaniene Frost, Halfway to the Grave

“Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“Maybe I'd always been broken and dark inside. Maybe someone who've been born whole and good would have put down the ash dagger and embraced death rather than what lay before me.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The stoics divided philosophy into three branches: logic, physics, and ethics. Logic covered not only the rules of correct argumentation, but also grammar, linguistics, rhetorical theory, epistemology, and all the tools that might be needed to discover the truth of any matter. Physics was concerned with the nature of the world and the laws that govern it, and so included ontology and theology as well as what we would recognize as physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Ethics was concerned with how to achieve happiness, or how to live a fulfilled and flourishing life as a human being. A stoic sage was supposed to be fully expert in all three aspects.”
― Robin Waterfield, Meditations

“The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change.

----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“We can say that Faustus makes a choice, and that he is responsible for his choice, but there is in the play a suggestion—sometimes explicit, sometimes only dimly implicit—that Faustus comes to destruction not merely through his own actions but through the actions of a hostile cosmos that entraps him. In this sense, too, there is something of Everyman in Faustus. The story of Adam, for instance, insists on Adam's culpability; Adam, like Faustus, made himself, rather than God, the center of his existence. And yet, despite the traditional expositions, one cannot entirely suppress the commonsense response that if the Creator knew Adam would fall, the Creator rather than Adam is responsible for the fall; Adam ought to have been created of better stuff.”
― Sylvan Barnet, Dr. Faustus

“It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“I'd rather strive for the kind of interview where instead of me asking to introduce myself to society, society asks me to introduce myself to society.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; and his selfishness is no less blind than was formerly his devotedness to others. If society is tranquil, it is not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but because it fears its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life. Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure. The desires, the repinings, the sorrows, and the joys of the present time lead to no visible or permanent result, like the passions of old men, which terminate in impotence.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“If Joan was mad, all Christendom was mad too; for people who believe devoutly in the existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad as the people who think they see them. Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at the devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk: he had a more vivid imagination, and hd perhaps eaten and slept less: that was all.”
― Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan

“During the next few years I wrote a series of Martian pensées, Shakespearean "asides," wandering thoughts, long night visions, predawn half-dreams. The French, like St. John Perce, practice this to perfection. It is the half-poem, half-prose paragraph that runs as little as one hundred words or as long as a full page on any subject, summoned by weather, time, architectural facade, fine wine, good victuals, a view of the sea, quick sunsets, or a long sunrise. From these elements one upchucks rare hairballs or a maundering Hamlet-like soliloquy.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Temperee, riante, (comme le sont celles d'automne dans la tres gracieuse ville de Buenos Aires) resplendissait la matinee de ce 28 avril: dix heures venait de sonner aux horloges et, a cet instant, eveillee, gesticulant sous le soleil matinal, la Grande Capitale du Sud etait un epi d'hommes qui se disputaient a grands cris la possession du jour et de la terre.”
― Leopoldo Marechal, Adán Buenosayres

“The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly.”
― Zoë Heller, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my had. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation.”
― Brady Udall

“Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?'..
.. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me.
'Well, Mitch it is then,' Morrie says, as if closing a deal.
'And, Mitch?'
Yes?
'I hope one day you will think of me as your friend.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“Do I know you?" Amaram asked.
"No," Wit said lightly, "but fortunately, you can add it to the list of many, many things of which you are ignorant.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“The Phantasm story started decades ago with the written word when, in a cabin up by Big Bear Lake in the mountains of Southern California, I literally put pen to paper to write an original screenplay. That screenplay became a film, and then another film and three more films after that. Now I'd like to put pen to paper once more and return to the beginning.”
― Don Coscarelli, Phiction: Tales from the World of Phantasm

“The longer I write historical narratives, the more chilled I become by the fog of ignorance in which governments make big decisions.”
― Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

“Since I had described the European cities where the stories take place from memory, and at a distance, I wanted to verify the accuracy of my recollections after twenty years, and I made a fast trip to reacquaint myself with Barcelona, Geneva, Rome, and Paris.

Not one of them had any connection to my memories. Through an astonishing inversion, all of them, like all of present-day Europe, had become strange: True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality. This meant I could not detect the dividing line between disillusionment and nostalgia.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Strange Pilgrims

“the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Strange Pilgrims

“The notes blatted skyward as the sun rose over the Canada geese, feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically pedaling unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by cruel Nature’s maxim, ‘Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work,’ and at last I knew Pittsburgh.”
― Sheila Richter

“Like all good ghost stories, Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" sets a trap for its protagonist. In the classic version of the form[...], the hero is a gentleman of mildly investigatory bent: a scholar, a collector, or an antiquarian. What lures him into the vicinity of the ghost is often intellectual curiosity and, occasionally, greed; what attracts the ghost's wrath or malevolence is the hero's tendency to meddle, to open the sealed room, to root around for treasure, to pocket a souvenir. The hero ("victim" might be a better word) typically hasn't got much personality beyond his intrusiveness; he's just someone inclined to put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and to rue the consequences.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House