Staci Miller > Staci's Quotes

“I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“And I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again…”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I'd follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good long busy lives, and if we can't spend them together, we... we'll have to spend them apart.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas

“... it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would.
Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“Something radically new, the producer tells me. Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog's windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“You're not very good at this, are you?'
'At what I do, I'm the best. This isn't what I do.”
― James Sallis, Drive

“Bombs fall and wipe out civilization as we know it, two things come up out of the ashes: roaches and F-150s.”
― James Sallis, Drive