Quote From a Book

"...[D]estiny[:]...a fancy word for being told what to do with [your] life."

and

"If [you] want lessons in becoming invisible, the first rule [is] to hold still...The second rule—being the least important person in the room."

~~from “Unfinished” by Kendra C. Highley in the anthology Star Rebels
 

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting
(The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho)

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë,

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
 

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
― William O. Douglas, The Douglas Letters: Selections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas
 
"[Trying to have a career as a professional athlete is] a useless thing to do with yourself, okay for a bit of private discipline or for a collegiate extracurric, but you [don’t] make a career out of it. For a career...you [have] to make some real use of your life, which [means] entering into the human race, not the 1500-meter one. You [have] to justify your presence on the planet by giving something to the others who [are] here in space and time sharing it with you, and being the [best athlete isn’t] close to being enough."
~~from Tom O’Bedlam by Robert Silverberg
 
"...[Each] world has a song that is begun with the first life on a world, a song that sounds within the world to foster life and variation. All living creatures are a part of the song which shall be sung forever, until the last star goes out...[But] sometimes living creatures do not wish to be part of the song; they do not hear it; they rise up against it; they cry that they are larger than the song and more important than the music, and when their words drown out the song, then the world begins to die. Within the song, we are an immortal resonance. Outside it, we are like the tinkle of a tiny bell, gone quickly into nothing."
~~from Singer From the Sea by Sheri S. Tepper
 
"We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up and takes us. The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man's control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places. ~ Mark Lawrence - Prince of Thrones (The broken empire, #1)
 
"Some people [have] been waiting their whole lives to live lawlessly, and they [would be] the first to take to the streets [in a disaster or apocalypse]."
~~from The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
 
"It is required of every man...that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide...Business! Mankind [should have been] my business. The common welfare [should have been] my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence, were [supposed to have been], all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
~~Jacob Marley’s ghost to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
 
"I[’ve often] felt disappointed that books and life [are] so different and wondered which [is] wrong. Sometimes I still do."
~~from “The Leaning Lincoln” by Will Ludwigsen in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Oct./Nov. 2016 issue
 
"...[A] species either learns to come together on a global scale, or dissolves into squabbling factions doomed to extinction, whether through war or ecological disasters too great to tackle divided."
~~from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers) by Becky Chambers
 
"For that which befalleth the sons of man befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity."
~~Ecclesiastes 3:19, King James Christian Bible
 
"No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate."
~~from The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston
 
"...[R]evenge is a dish best eaten by muttonheads, an expensive luxury item that costs a lot and benefits very little, in the final analysis..."
~~from Thunderstruck by Jamie Sheffield
 
"No nation, even the most heroically hopeful, is immune to the forces of history."
~~from The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo
 
"…[T]rue power resides in reason, in eloquence, in compassion and in honest service to others. Power unites people in a common goal, a common cause, and unified action, empowering everyone in the process. Force[, on the other hand,] divides people and seeks to conquer others, empowering one at the expense of another. In life, we must recognize the difference between power and force and decide which one we will follow."
~~from Meteor Storm by David Capps
 
"Every piece of this [war] is man’s bullshit. They call this war 'a cloud over the land' but they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it’s rainin’!'
~~the character Ruby Thewes (played by Renee Zellweger) in the movie Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (book author) and Anthony Minghella (screenplay writer)
 

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