“Whoa, don't assume, dude," Marco said. "My mom always said, when you assume you make an ass of u and me--”
― Peter Lerangis, quote from Lost in Babylon
“A problem that seems unsolvable always looks different in the light of a new day.”
― Peter Lerangis, quote from Lost in Babylon
“To quote Alfred Einstein: ‘a follower tells, but a leader shows.”
― Peter Lerangis, quote from Lost in Babylon
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,”
― Peter Lerangis, quote from Lost in Babylon
“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.
That’s what I believe.
The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.
These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”
― Robert R. McCammon, quote from Boy's Life
“We cannot tell the rain when to come, nor the winter, nor the cold.”
― Peter V. Brett, quote from The Warded Man
“Listen," Kirillov stopped, gazing before him with fixed, ecstatic eyes. "Listen to a big idea: There was one day on earth, and in the middle of the earth stood three crosses. One on a cross believed so much that he said to another: 'This day you will be with me in paradise.' They day ended, they both died, went, and did not find either paradise or resurrection. What had been said would not prove true. Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is--madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil's vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you're a man.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Demons
“I’ll not have you bleeding to death on me. That would be just like you, to die and leave me the work of burying you. You have no consideration.”
― Robert Jordan, quote from The Shadow Rising
“في البداية تلتقي بشخص؛ شخص يختلف اختلافًا تامًا عن جميع من حولك من الأشخاص. شخص يرى كل شيء بمنظار مختلف، ويجعلك تُغيّر منظورك، وتلاحظ كل شيء من جديد، من الداخل ومن الخارج؛ ويُخيّل إليك أن بإمكانك الإبقاء على مسافة آمنة بينك وبينه؛ ويُخيّل إليك أنك تستطيع أن تُبحر وتشق طريقك في خضم هذه العاصفة الجميلة، حتى تدرك بغتةً أنه ألقى بك إلى العراء ولا يمكنك أن تتحكم بذلك.”
― Elif Shafak, quote from The Forty Rules of Love
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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