Quotable Quotations
"...they didn't think there was anything very odd in anyone being a little odd."
— James Hilton, Random Harvest
I've always felt like a bit of a weirdo because I like things that aren't necessarily cool or particularly mainstream. What I love about this is the good-natured acceptance it expresses; everyone's got a bit of weirdness in them, and there's nothing weird about it.
"The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant."
— Richard Curtis, Doctor Who, "Vincent and the Doctor"
It's actually rather hard to express how much I love this. It's like when you explain a joke, it kills the joke's funniness. I'll just say that this is a beautiful way of describing depression and its effects, and leave it at that.
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
— Carl Sagan
There's a reason reading has such a powerful influence over people. Music, film, television, they all have the power to move us, to present beautiful, illuminating, provocative ideas, but reading is something that gets inside us. It's the only way we can sit in complete silence and hear someone else's ideas, thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams.