“Wisdom tells me i'm nothing, love tells me I'm everything.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“Once there was a girl named Riley, the story began. Her heart was a secret garden, its stone walls cracked and weathered. And it was hungry. p160”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“Her parents didn't understand that braille meant big clunky books that marked you as different, while audiobooks live invisibly on your phone and text-to-speech gave you the whole damn internet.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“Nate liked money. It was a sleek and clever invention, beautiful in the way it lubricated power and focused people's attention. But it had a clumsy, brutal side, too. Money bludgeoned people without it into silence, shut them away in neighborhoods like this.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“Wisdom tells me I’m nothing. But love tells me I’m everything.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“What a waste, using her talents this way. Like a brain surgeon clubbing seals for a living.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“Maybe Flicker's power made her think differently than most people. She saw the world from so many perspectives, and seeing was half of enlightenment.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“The sight of Ethan - of Scam, since this was a mission - sent a trickle of annoyance down Crash's spine. Not like all the little itches of tech, just the ever-present need to punch him in the face.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
“The whole idea that he could take what he wanted without affecting anyone was bull****.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Zeroes
Scott Westerfeld
Born place: in Dallas, Texas, The United States
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“(pg.31)
"As it was, my first days on Earth were somewhat anticlimactic. Mother and Father seemed so happy tempting and corrupting that I didn't want to interrupt them. But the fact was that I hadn't the slightest clue what to do with myself. I tried to convince cows to take over the world, to rampage across the fields slaughtering all in their wake, to start a new religion of udder worship, to build cities devoted to the consumption of grass, their aqueducts running with fresh milk. I even prepared a pictorial presentation of cows traveling into outer space aboard butter-powered space churns, but the cows seemed unconvinced, and soon returned to wondering how many stomachs they had. The current belief was seventeen. Cows:Unambitious.”
― quote from Death: A Life
“I decide that we could always indulge ourselves later. First, I had a soul-eating stone of power to poke with a stick.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from Magic Lost, Trouble Found
“I would lie for hours by the window gazing down upon the black lake and up at the mountains silhouetted against the wan sky, with stars suspended above. Then a fearfully sweet, overpowering emotion would take hold of me—as though all the nighttime beauty looked at me accusingly, stars and mountain and lake longing for someone who understood the beauty and agony of their mute existence, who could express it for them, as though I were the one meant to do this and as though my true calling were to give expression to inarticulate nature in poems.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Peter Camenzind
“Vic didn’t mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.”
― Patricia Highsmith, quote from Deep Water
“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.
But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.
My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.”
― Matt Ridley, quote from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
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