Jacqueline Carey

Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?

That which yields is not always weak.

All knowledge is worth having.

All paths are present, always... and we can but choose among them.

There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire.

It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.

Your dreaming self seeks to tell you something your waking ears will not hear.

It is a fine line, in all of us, between civilization and savagery. To any who think they would never cross it, I can only say, if you have never known what it is to be utterly betrayed and abandoned, you cannot know how close it is

Happiness is the highest form of wisdom.

It is my observations, though, that happiness limits the amount of suffering one is willing to inflict upon others.

Hilary Mantel

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

Those who are made can be unmade.

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

Peter Høeg

If you want to support others you have to stay upright yourself.

There's no simple aritmetic for life's distribution of happiness and sorrow, no such thing as a standard share.

We sat there and I knew that this was how it felt to be totally accepted. You sit close to another person and are understood, everything is understood and nothing is judged and you are indispensable.

Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important.

People under thirty haven't yet stopped believing that something wonderful can suddenly happen.

April light was unlike any other. It had a charming, optimistic unreliability like an overbid hand in poker. It gave a promise of spring that it wasn't sure it could keep.

Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.
Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.

In ten years they would be dead, deported or in leadership positions.

Dan Brown

Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.

Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.

Sooner or later we've all got to let go of our past

Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.

To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.

Nothing captures human interest more than human tragedy.

Great minds are always feared by lesser minds.

Our minds sometimes see what our hearts wish were true.

Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel

Small minds have always lashed out at what they don't understand.

James Rollins

It ain't always rocket science, sometimes a door is just a door.

Books are keys that open many doors.

Often-times it's madness, not genius that moves the world forward. Who else but the mad would reach so far, stretching for the impossible and, in so doing, prove the impossible possible!

They wanted them to look like the Gods.
God doesn't look like this.

The truth is often one's best shield

Wringin' your hands only stops you from rollin' up your sleeves.

Always respect Mother Nature. Especially when she weighs 400 pounds and is guarding her baby.

The strong were always eating the weak.

Guns, grendels, or nuclear bombs; take your pick

Are you sure, Gray?'
He lifted his eyes. 'No . . . I'm not. I'm not sure of a damn thing.' He slipped his hands free of the monsignor's and peeled the battery off the phone, cutting the last ring in half. 'But that doesn't mean I won't act."

Poul Anderson

A fanatic is a man who, when he's lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his effort.

Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery.

You simply do not understand the human condition,” said the robot.

Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?

That,' he confessed aloud, 'was as ludicrous a case of mutual ineptitude as the gods of slapstick ever engineered. We both deserve to be tickled to death by small green centipedes. Well... if you keep quiet about it, I will.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. 

Their flight was not less exhilarating for being explainable.

So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...

James Howard Kunstler

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.

The three of us ate a fine supper of grilled trout with sorrel cream sauce, and red potatoes out of Britney's old garden behind the ruins of the Watling place, and watercress sautéed in butter for hardly a moment with a dash of vinegar, and cream custard with wild blackberries for dessert.

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

Suzanne Collins

You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real.

Remember, we're madly in love, so it's all right to kiss me anytime you feel like it.

You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope

Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor.

Well, don't expect us to be too impressed. We just saw Finnick Odair in his underwear.

I can feel Peeta press his forehead into my temple and he asks, 'So now that you've got me, what are you going to do with me?' I turn into him. 'Put you somewhere you can't get hurt.

Stupid people are dangerous.

What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.

And then he gives me a smile that just seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through me.

Stephen Baxter

We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We're like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion.

When you get close enough to someone you're never really alone again.

Sometimes people say that we're living in the future, and time's up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn't about the future. It's about change and present-day concerns.

A brief life burns brightly.

I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythm of Earth's day, Earth's year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart.

Well, don't stand about like that, man; if you're no use you're certainly no ornament. Bring that in and tell me what it says.

This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.

Clive Barker

Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.

Fuck Heaven. I haven't gotten Earth sorted out yet.

To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels.

Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days.

I dreamed I spoke in another's language,
I dreamed I lived in another's skin,
I dreamed I was my own beloved,
I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.

I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,
And when I breathed a garden came,
I dreamed I knew all of Creation,
I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.