moochi > moochi's Quotes

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Afterward I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I'm bettering myself, I thought. I'm going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“didn’t know how to join in their new friendship without debasing myself for their attention.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“The one standing in infinite glory is you; the one fallen from grace is also you. What matters is ‘you’ and not the state of you.”
― Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù, 天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú]

“Only after having met you did I rediscover that it's such a simple thing to be happy.”
― Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù, 天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú]

“Young man, there are two cringe-worthy phrases in one’s life that must be said, no matter what.”

“Which two?”

“‘Thank you’, and 'I’m sorry’.”

“What can anybody do to me if I don’t say them?”

“Someday, you’ll say those words in tears.”
― Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, 魔道祖师 [Mó Dào Zǔ Shī]

“Last‌ ‌time,‌ ‌they‌ ‌spent‌ ‌eight‌ ‌hundred‌ ‌years‌ ‌running‌ ‌towards‌ ‌each‌ ‌other.‌ ‌

This‌ ‌time,‌ ‌it‌ ‌only‌ ‌took‌ ‌an‌ ‌instant‌ ‌to‌ ‌fall‌ ‌into‌ ‌each‌ ‌other’s‌ ‌embrace.‌ ‌”
― Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù, 天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú]

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“I’m a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“In China, any idea that dared to take flight would only crash back to the ground. The gravity of reality is too strong.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.”
― Ken Liu, The Three-Body Problem

“Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“the ocean, its remorseless, lonely conversation with itself”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“This, I thought approvingly, was a place that had no needs, and therefore no wants.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“To be a scientist is to learn to live all one's life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“There is a point - for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago - when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“She's a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She'd been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she'd never even known they were there.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian