Celeste Arritola > Celeste's Quotes

“Fedin laughed outright, a grim, calculating gesture as hard and unfeeling as cold steel. “Twenty million Russians have been slaughtered by the Fascists in the last six years..... Always remember this, Squadron Leader. It was our war, our victory and now it is our Berlin. We tolerate your presence in this city… if that.”
― KGE Konkel, Who Has Buried the Dead?: From Stalin to Putin … The last great secret of World War Two

“I got the job as a Bingo host and did better than they imagined. Never before had they had an emcee so affable and funny, so enthusiastic to give away prizes, or so quick to make a tumor joke after calling out 'B-9'".”
― John Bennardo, Just a Typo: The Cancellation of Celebrity Mo Riverlake

“Everyone is recharged for the second half, no bell, no forced learning, no principal’s office for tardiness or absenteeism; instead, a voluntary return to our collective pane of learning. Final conversations simmer down and the attention is refocused.”
― Colin Phelan, The Local School

“Each time Olan Chapman comes to life, his anti-quarks remain on the far side of the Time Wall. After his life cycle ends, his quarks collapse back to these roots, and – presto – America's most wanted man is ready for his next adventure.”
― Kyle Keyes, Worm Holes

“Thickly forested regions of Phuoc Tuy including the Rung Sat swamps and farms considered to be controlled by the Vietcong, were regularly sprayed by defoliants including “Agent Orange” using aircraft. This was both an inhumane and unsuccessful strategy which only destroyed enough food to feed 245,000 Vietnamese people for a year resulting in a propaganda gift to the Vietcong. (Ham, 2007). Given that defoliation did not uncover the enemy, who kept on fighting from jungle, caves and tunnels, the whole defoliation programme must be considered a failure. Given also, that birth defects and other health problems associated with defoliants can be directly blamed upon “Agent Orange”, it stands to reason that the allies in the Second Indochina War who sprayed it upon villages and farms can in fact be said to be, “Guilty of War Crimes!”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“The day could not come soon enough when these mini-Nazis would be disbanded. When ordinary citizens would begin trusting their own instincts again, instead of blindly following anyone in a uniform telling them what to do.”
― Amy L. Bernstein, The Potrero Complex

“Gardening is easier and quicker when spacings are correct for different plants.”
― Charles Dowding, Charles Dowding's Skills for Growing

“Immediately after that fate-filled evening in May, the phone booth in its entirety had been confiscated by the Homicide Unit as embodying significant criminal evidence of murder. More accurately, though, the booth was like an envelope encapsulating the entire crime scene, including splattered skull fragments.”
― Tom Baldwin, Macom Farm

“Heidi's role as grand master was to monitor all the women and to manage their locations and communication. Even though she’d done this many times on multiple missions, her heartbeat still pounded in her ears.”
― Kirsten Fullmer, Trouble on Main Street

“Each day a whole world passes away, largely unappreciated, numbly relegated to obligation, commerce and routine. One day seems as unremarkable as the next. It's only through the inexorable accretion of days, weeks, months and years, that we come to appreciate with heartbreaking clarity how incredibly unique and precious each lost day has been.”
― S.W. Clemens

“Charlie said your friend’s disappeared,” chirped Wendy.
“No, he hasn’t.” Adam denied it. “He’s in the house. Now, look, what’s all this you’ve been telling them?”
“Nothing, I haven’t told them anything.” Charlie looked drunk.
“He said you’ve turned your friend into a crayfish,” insisted Wendy.
“He’s always making little jokes like that, and you fell for it. How am I supposed to do that, for heaven’s sake?” Adam was angry.
“With your little book you found. What’s that under your arm?”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“And that’s when it got ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you used to call “First World.” One of the delegates from a prewar “developing” country suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their punishment for raping and pillaging the “victim nations of the south.” Maybe, he said, by keeping the “white hegemony” distracted with their own problems, the undead invasion might allow the rest of the world to develop “without imperialist intervention.” Maybe the living dead had brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end, they had brought justice for the future. Now, my people have little love for the northern gringos, and my family suffered enough under Pinochet to make that animosity personal, but there comes a point where private emotions must give way to objective facts. How could there be a “white hegemony” when the most dynamic prewar economies were China and India, and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba? How could you call the colder countries a northern issue when so many people were just barely surviving in the Himalayas, or the Andes of my own Chile? No, this man, and those who agreed with him, weren’t talking about justice for the future. They just wanted revenge for the past.


[Sighs.] After all we’d been through, we still couldn’t take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other’s throats.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“เราไม่ควรหัวเราะความฝันของคนอื่น
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ชีวิตไม่มีอะไรง่าย แต่ก็ไม่มีเหตุผลที่จะยอมแพ้ ถ้านายตั้งใจทำอะไรจริงจัง นายจะประหลาดใจเมื่อพบว่าตัวเองประสบความสำเร็จ
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และที่สำคัญ คนเราเกิดหนเดียว ก็ควรใช้ชีวิตให้คุ้มค่าที่สุด”
― Louis Sachar , Holes

“I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But (...) we must see all scars as beauty. (...) Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader