“What takes more guts? To fight for your own life at any cost—or prove that you're willing to lose it?”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“You’re never ready for the truth. No matter how much you think you know, it always takes you by surprise.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“Where's the course called How to Lead a Life of Crime? That's what this is about, isn't it? You've got everyone thinking this is the best school in the country, but it's really just a Hogwarts for hustlers.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“You've either bat-shit insane or you've watched too many movies. This isn't Star Wars, Mandel. I'm not Luke Skywalker. My dad's not Darth Vader. And you sure as hell aren't my Obi-Wan.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“Aside from the nagging, he's the most entertaining hallucination I've ever had.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“What would it be like to exist in a world without suffering? To have no needs, only desires? To be surrounded by so much beauty that you forget how ugly life is for everyone else? Who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t be willing to fight for it? What the alumni did to get there – lie, cheat, steal, kill – I’m sure they’d all say it was worth it. And I bet they sleep soundly because they know that their nameless, faceless victims would have done the same thing.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“See? You’re the crazy one, you redheaded freak.
I’ve been attempting to translate the phrase into Latin. If I ever succeed, I shall make it my personal motto.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“Gwendolyn and I have a beautiful relationship. She tells me everything. I haven't killed her yet.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“I kept my arms around Joi and my face buried deep in her hair while I waited for Peter Pan to slip through the window. I thought I needed him to tell me what I should do. But he never showed up. He left me alone with a girl who smelled of jasmine and cocoa butter. And before I fell asleep, I finally realized that was more than enough.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“Why are you here?"
"Because you never said goodbye.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“You're my one good thing now.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“Can I ask you a question? I swear it's not about heaven."
Joi laughs. "Shoot."
"Why do you love me?" I ask her.
"Because you love me back," she says without hesitation.
"You have no idea how much," I tell her.
"Yes, I do," she says.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“Joi..."
"Shut up," she says as she unbuttons my shirt. "I didn't bring you here for a heart-to-heart. How do I get this thing off without hurting you?”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
“You will also be called upon to provide well-timed distractions. Get the whole country arguing about sex education or gays in the military, and Americans will stop paying attention to all the things they should fear.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from How to Lead a Life of Crime
Kirsten Miller
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“I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."
Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.
With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.
I know how they make up my thoughts.
These thoughts.”
― Ted Chiang, quote from Stories of Your Life and Others
“I will wait for you until the gold from the sun dwindles away.”
― H.S. Crow, quote from Lunora and the Monster King
“Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold
that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give
up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will
never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be de-
struction.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed.61 Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, quote from Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“What you must first understand is the very nature of the Verity. Humans have a tendency for darkness and light. To choose good or evil. But no such mixture exists for the Verity or the Void. The Void houses no light. The Verity embraces no darkness. So when the Verity seeks a new vessel, it always searches out the purest heart--the person least likely to be swayed by darkness. A heart so true has the capacity to love like no other. And a love like that? It changes a person.”
― Sara Ella, quote from Unblemished
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Capital, Vol 1: A Cr...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
