“The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little bit less alone in the world. You're part of this cosmic community of people who've thought about this thing, whatever it happens to be.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“You didn’t win the game of life by losing the least. That would be one of those—what were they called again?—Pyrrhic victories. Real winning was having the most to lose, even if it meant you might lose it all. Even though it meant you would lose it all, sooner or later.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Why had he assumed time was some sort of infinite resource? Now the hourglass had busted open, and what he’d always assumed was just a bunch of sand turned out to be a million tiny diamonds.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“You don’t wanna go out of this world with regrets. If there’s some-
thing you want to do, you do it. You take this life by the balls and you tell it that you existed.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Do you think it is better to fail at something worthwhile, or succeed at something meaningless”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“the fundamental rule of life: Things were never so bad that they couldn’t get worse.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Beauty always made a target of its possessor. Every other human quality was hidden easily enough – intelligence, talent, selfishness, even madness – but beauty would not be concealed.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little less alone in the world.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Ardor right over," Eliza said. They laughed. The asteroid was a little bigger now, brighter, and still they went on laughing. Laughing in the face of what they couldn't predict or change or control. Would it be fire and brimstone? Would it be Armageddon? Or would it be a second chance? Eliza held tight to her friends, laughing, and a pair of hands land soft as feathers on her shoulders, like the hands of a ghost, laughing and laughing as Ardor swept along its fated course, laughing and through that laughter, praying. Praying for forgiveness. Praying for grace. Praying for mercy.
0”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“They said no man was an island, and Anita figured that was probably true. But women were; they had to be. And even if someone bothered to sail over and disembark, he'd soon discover that there was always a castle at the center of the island, surrounded by a deep moat, with a rickety drawbridge and archers manning the battlements and a big pot of oil posed above the gate, ready to boil alive anyone who dared to cross the threshold.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“She was miserable because she kept hoping things would change. If she could eradicate the hope, she could eradicate the sadness.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“And there in the darkness of the hotel room, scarcely more than twenty-four hours before the maybe end of the world, the three of them managed to laugh together. It turned out that no amount of terror could stop the great human need to connect. Or maybe, Anita thought, terror was actually at the heart of that need. After all, every life ended in an apocalypse, in one way or another.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Instead of a few months, the doctors gave him a year. That was how you could be lucky without being lucky. That was how you could be a winner and still lose.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“As a little kid, Peter had figured that once you reached a certain age, somebody just handed you all the knowledge you'd need in order to be an adult. But it turned out that wasn't how it worked.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Anita felt like she finally understood why love was symbolized by the grotesque pumping organ, always threatening to clog, or break, or attack. Because the heart was the body's engine, and love was an act of the body. Your mind could tell you who to hate or respect or envy, but only your body--your nostrils and your mouth and the wide, blank canvas of your skin--could tell you who to love.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Today was just another shit day in a life that sometimes felt like a factory specializing in the construction of shit days.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Just another little piece of utterly irrelevant history, aspiring to permanence, doomed to oblivion.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Was life too short? Of course- there was never enough time to do all the things you wanted to do. And of course not- if it were any longer, you'd appreciate it even less than you already did.
Was it better to live primarily for the good of yourself, or for the good of others? For the good of yourself, of course- it was madness to take responsibility for other people's happiness. And for others, of course- selfishness was just another way to isolate yourself, when everyone knew that true happiness was all about friendship and love.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Karass: A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Then I'll just tell you that it doesn't matter whose fault it is. Blame is just a way to keep score, and adults don't play games like that.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“The end of the world revealed the futility of all commemorative plaques.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“That was how you could be lucky without being lucky. That was how you could be a winner and still lose.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“She looked up toward the sky, toward the implacable sparkle of good old Ardor, and saw that the two of them—she and the asteroid—were caught up I a battle of wills. In that moment, she stopped being afraid of it, even dared it to come, because she knew thre was mo way it could crave death as much as she craved life.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“This is the twenty-first century. The oceans are rising. Mad dictators have access to nuclear weapons. Corporatism and the dumbing down of the media have destroyed the very foundations of democracy. Anyone who isn’t afraid is a moron.” There”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“It occurred to Anita that hatred and dislike and even indifference were all luxuries, born of the mistaken belief that anything could last forever.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“The best books, they don’t talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you’d always thought about, but that you didn’t think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you’re a little bit less alone in the world. You’re part of this cosmic community of people who’ve thought about this thing, whatever it happens to be.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“He was the kind of guy who had a unique facial expression dedicated to thinking.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“Fiction described reality better than non-fiction.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
Tommy Wallach
Born place: in Stamford, CT, The United States
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“No one is ever holy without suffering.”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, quote from Vanity Fair
“Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The God Delusion
“He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees.
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow
by fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten
Your brain to bubble cool,-
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.”
― Emily Dickinson, quote from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“ The guys in the saloons shoving free ones across the bar and saying happy new year and many more of them kid you been a good customer have one on the house happy new year and the hell with the prohibitionists some day the bastards are going to give us trouble. The girls from the hash houses and the girls from the hotels and the guys swarming out of dirty little apartment bedrooms and music and dancing and smoke and somebody with the ukulele and have another and the feeling of being lonesome that everybody has inside him and people bouncing against you and off you and have another one and a girl passing out at the bar and a fight and happy new year.”
― Dalton Trumbo, quote from Johnny Got His Gun
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Sabrina Fair
The Shockwave RiderBookQuoters 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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