“You remember the word we said when we pressed our hands together, right?"
I nodded. Forem. But what does it mean?"
"Forever,” he said his breath shaky. "It means we're bonded together forever.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Underworld
“Everyone will hurt you if you let them in.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Underworld
“I’m not sure I know how to feel happy yet. Well, I mean sometimes when I look at the stars I think I might feel happy…but”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Underworld
“I mean, was there really a difference between death and losing every ounce of who you are?”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Underworld
“The next thing I knew I was laying face first on the ground,”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Underworld
“Forever,” he said, his breath shaky. “It means we’re bonded together forever.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Underworld
“Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects?
I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a choice?
Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline.
The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The school-teacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.”
Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because “hobby” is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies “the arts.”
Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this: that those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death.
To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behavior. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call “the arts”; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furor often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight.”
― Stephen King, quote from Night Shift
“Задименият бар бе изпълнен с блус и с хора, които се наливаха с алкохол, за да прогонят тъгата.
Ако бяха кучета, до един щяха да бъдат навин, да се тъпчат с трева и да се мъчат да повърнат онова, което ги кара да се чувстват толкова зле.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
“It was completely unshocking that there were monsters in the world, secret
rituals and underground burrows filled with the dead, when in my own way, I was secret and sort of monstrous too. It just didn’t show in the same way.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, quote from The Replacement
“She smells like angels ought to smell, the perfect woman... the Goddess. Goldie. She says her name is Goldie.”
― Frank Miller, quote from Sin City, Vol. 1: The Hard Goodbye
“The conclusion that all these studies converge upon is that about half of your IQ was inherited, and less than a fifth was due to the environment you shared with your siblings – the family. The rest came from the womb, the school and outside influences such as peer groups. But even this is misleading. Not only does your IQ change with age, but so does its heritability. As you grow up and accumulate experiences, the influence of your genes increases. What? Surely, it falls off? No: the heritability of childhood IQ is about forty-five per cent, whereas in late adolescence it rises to seventy-five per cent. As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmental influences are not inexorably cumulative. Heritability does not mean immutability.”
― Matt Ridley, quote from Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
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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