“We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future.”
“Your entire sense of self-worth is predicated upon your belief that you matter, that you matter to the universe. But you don't. Because we are the ants.”
“That's the problem with memories: you can visit them, but you can't live in them.”
“Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.”
“What if I don’t give a shit about the world?”
“I’d say that’s pretty fucking sad.”
“Why?”
“Because the world is so beautiful.”
“People don’t really change; they just find something else to give their life meaning.”
“The universe may forget us, but our light will brighten the darkness for eons after we've departed this world. The universe may forget us, but it can't forget us until we're gone, and we're still here, our futures still unwritten. We can choose to sit on our (expletive) and wait for the end, or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd...lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live. The universe may forget us, but it doesn't matter. Because we are the ants, and we'll keep marching on.”
“Why me?”
“Because I can be myself around you, even if I don’t know who I am yet.”
“Grief is an ocean, and guilt the undertow that pulls me beneath the waves and drowns me.”
“Maybe the only way to really start over is to tear everything apart.”
“Maybe love doesn’t require falling after all. Maybe it only requires that you choose to be in it. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen with us or how much time we had left, but I wasn’t going to waste a second of it.”
“There's an amazing world out there for you to discover, Henry Denton, but you have to be willing to discover yourself first.”
“You spend your life hoarding memories against the day you'll lack the energy to go out and make new ones, because that's the comfort of the old age. The ability to look back at your life and know that you left your mark on the world. But I'm losing my memories, it's like someone's broken into my piggy bank and is robbing me one penny at a time. It's happening so slowly, I can hardly tell what's missing.”
“As human beings, we seek meaning in everything. We're so good at discovering patterns that we see them where they don't exist.”
“We're all Holden Caulfield at fifteen, but when we grow up we want to be Atticus Finch”
“The universe may forget us, but it doesn't matter. Because we are the ants, and we'll keep marching on.”
“We try to make guests feel welcome," said Dee, scuttling behind his desk. He pulled off his pointed hat and, to Vimes's amazement, put on a pair of thick smoked glasses.
"You had papers?" he said. Vimes handed them over.
"It says here "His Grace"," the dwarf said, after reading them for awhile.
"Yes, that's me."
"And there's a sir."
"That's me, too."
"And an excellency."
"'fraid so." Vimes narrowed his eyes. "I was blackboard monitor for awhile, too.”
“In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts… or Rubinstein’s monsters… or is that Wallenstein?”
“Frankenstein.”
“Tavi looked wildly around the courtyard, and when his gaze flicked toward them, his face lit witha ferocious smile. "Uncle Bernard! Uncle Bernard!" he shouted, pointing at Doroga. "He followed me home! Can we keep him?”
“It was hard to explain to students that there was a rule that trumped all of the others: Always trust your instincts.”
“I believe that worrying about a bad thing prepares you for it when it comes. If you worry, the bad thing doesn't hit you as hard. You can roll with the punch if you see it coming.”
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