The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

• There were all sorts of things to wonder about.
• You never see all that you see.
• Some of what you don't see in that glance you'll see afterwards, in the eye of your memory.  The difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.
• To act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences.
• Names were secret things, full of power.
• Don't ignore your suspicions.
• His first impulse was to simply tear it off, like Clark Kent while Lois Lane was tied to a railroad track or something, but that was no good in real life; sooner or later you had to explain those missing buttons.
• Art imitates life and life imitates art.
• For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer.  Our lives are like these things I build.  Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.
• It's up to men to build things, paisan.  It's up to God to blow them down.
• The best course was the safest one.
• It was perhaps fitting to kill a despicable man with a despicable weapon.
• There are people who need people to need them.
• Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies:  with him weak enough to lay blame.
• I don't discuss philosophy.  I don't study history.  All I know is what's past is past, and what's ahead is ahead.
• What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.
• I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe.
• Sometimes love actually did conquer all.
• Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
• One fool knows another.
• Control the things you can control.  Let everything else take a flying fuck at you, and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.
• We all die in time.  It's not just the world that moves on.

3/2/2013

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

• He would keep going until something changed, and if nothing changed, he would keep going, anyway.
• You will not see what you do not look for.
• If given a knife and a hand in which to hold it, the mind would eventually eat itself.  Not because it wanted to; because it did not want to.
• There had always been murder in the world, but telling himself so was no comfort.
• Sooner or later, if there isn't a turncoat, the people make one.
• When traitors are called heroes (and heroes traitors), dark times must have fallen.
• There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the same place--upon the killing ground.
• Time's the thief of memory.
• The only real beauty is order and love and light.
• In the end there was only ka.
• Boys must put on their fathers' pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back on their hangers; it was like that.  The father pretends he doesn't notice the new way the pants are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under their noses.
• How we make large circles in earth for ourselves.  Around we go, back to the start and the start is there again:  resumption, which was ever the curse of daylight.
• There are other worlds than these.
• He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself.  Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.
• The finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
• New knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries
• The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size.  Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size.
• Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
• If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for a race of gnats among an infinitude of race of gnats?  Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space?  And if He does see...what must the nature of such a God be?  Where does He live?  How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
• Only equals speak the truth.

2/14/2013

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

• Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?
• The word "dying" was not synonymous with "useless."
• I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough.
• I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died, which I figured was my natural fate.
• Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.
• Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.
• Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.
• Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.
• Dying is only one thing to be sad over.  Living unhappily is something else.
• The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves.  We're teaching the wrong things.  And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.  Create your own.
• Life is a series of pulls back and forth.  You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.  Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.  You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.  A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band.  And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
• Love wins.  Love always wins.
• So many people walk around with a meaningless life.  They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important.  This is because they're chasing the wrong things.  The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
• If you really want it, then you'll make your dream happen.
• He couldn't understand why both sides didn't simply communicate with each other and solve their problems.
• Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
• The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
• Why are we embarrassed by silence?  What comfort do we find in all the noise?
• I give myself a good cry if I need it.  But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.
• How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity.
•  Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.  And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too--even when you're in the dark.  Even when you're falling.
• There's a better approach.  To know you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time.  That's better.  That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you're living.
• Do what the Buddhists do.  Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, 'Is today the day?  Am I ready?  Am I doing all I need to do?  Am I being the person I want to be?'
• Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
• Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking.  We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.
• Even I don't know what 'spiritual development' really means.  But I do know we're deficient in some way.  We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don't satisfy us.  The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.
• There is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family.  If you don't have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don't have much at all.  Love is so supremely important.
• Without love, we are birds with broken wings.
• If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.
• Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent.
• Detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you.  On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully.  That's how you are able to leave it.
• Take any emotion--love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness.  If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid.  You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief.  You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.  But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely.  You know what pain is.  You know what love is.  You know what grief is.  And only then can you say, 'All right.  I have experienced that emotion.  I recognize that emotion.  Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'
• Turn on the faucet.  Wash yourself with the emotion.  It won't hurt you.  It will only help.  If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, "All right, it's just fear, I don't have to let it control me.  I see it for what it is."
• The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads--none of us ever got enough of that.  We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of--unconditional love, unconditional attention.  Most of us didn't get enough.
• I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great.  All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves.  
• And in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise.  They have very little understanding about life.  Who wants to live every day when you don't know what's going on?  When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy--and you believe them!  It's such nonsense.
• It's very simple.  As you grow, you learn more.  If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two.  Aging is not just decay, you know.  It's growth.  It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
• If you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back.  You want to go forward.  You want to see more, do more.  You can't wait until sixty-five.
• It is impossible for the old not to envy the young.  But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that.
• You have to find what's good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now.  Looking back makes you competitive.  And, age is not a competitive issue.
• How can I be envious of where you are--when I've been there myself?
• We put our values in the wrong things.  And it leads to very disillusioned lives.
• We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country.  Do you know how they brainwash people?  They repeat something over and over.  And that's what we do in this country.  Owning things is good.  More money is good.  More property is good.  More commercialism is good.  More is good.  More is good.  We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise.  The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.
• You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for a sense of comradeship.
• When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.
• There's big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need.  You need food, you want a chocolate sundae.  You have to be honest with yourself.  You don't need the latest sports car, you don't need the biggest house.  The truth is, you don't get satisfaction from those things.  You know what really gives you satisfaction?  Offering others what you have to give.
• This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.
• If you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it.  They will look down at you anyhow.  And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it.  They will only envy you.  Status will get you nowhere.  Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.
• Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.
• He looked you straight in the eye, and he listened as if you were the only person in the world.  How much better would people get along if their first encounter each day were like this--instead of a grumble from a waitress or a bus driver or a boss?
• I believe in being fully present.  That means you should be with the person you're with.
• So many people with far smaller problems are so self-absorbed, their eyes glaze over if you speak for more than thirty seconds.  They already have something else in mind--a friend to call, a fax to send, a lover they're daydreaming about.  They only snap back to full attention when you finish talking, at which point they say "Uh-huh" or "Yeah, really" and fake their way back to the moment.  Part of the problem is that everyone is in such a hurry.  People haven't found meaning in their lives, so they're running all the time looking for it.  They think the next car, the next house, the next job.  Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.
• Once you start running, I said, it's hard to slow yourself down.
•  In this culture, it's so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that.  But the poor kids today, either they're too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced.  They don't know what they want in a partner.  They don't know who they are themselves--so how can they know who they're marrying?
• I've learned this much about marriage.  You get tested.  You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don't.
• There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage.  If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  And if you don't have a common set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  Your values must be alike.  And the biggest one of those values, your belief in the importance of your marriage.
• I thought about how much time we spend trying to shape our bodies, lifting weights, crunching sit-ups, and in the end, nature takes it away from us anyhow.
• People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does.  That's what our economy does.  Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them.  And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself.  You start making money a god.  It is all part of this culture.
• Here's what I mean by building your own little sub-culture.  I don't mean you disregard every rule of your community.  I don't go around naked, for example.  I don't run through red lights.  The little things, I can obey.  But the big things--how we think, what we value--those you must choose yourself.  You can't let anyone--or any society--determine those for you.
• No matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness.  We don't see what we could be.  We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.  But if you're surrounded by people who say 'I want mine now,' you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.
• If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.
• We all have the same beginning--birth--and we all have the same end--death.  So how different can we be?  Invest in the human family.  Invest in people.  Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
• Don't let go too soon, but don't hang on too long.
• Be compassionate.  And take responsibility for each other.  If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.
• Forgive yourself before you die.  Then forgive others.
• You can't get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.
• Death ends a life, not a relationship.
• There is no formula to relationships.  They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.
• Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.
• Pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.
• None of us can undo what we've done, or relive a life already recorded.

1/25/2013

Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich

• Sometimes bits and pieces of seeemingly benign information turned out to be useful.
• What was important was that I look like a doormat at appropriate moments.
• Doing anything (no matter how tedious and insignificant) is better than doing nothing.
• It's funny how people form alliances around the common denominator of simply needing a friend.
• Sometimes paranoia is justified.
• Plums don't do Valium.  We mainline cheesecake.

1/15/2013

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

• Money sharpens the memory.
• Time passes slowly when you are actually doing something.
• Some voices stay in your mind.  Even in the dark people are recognized.
• You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians, but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.
• All crooks are gamblers, more or less, and all gamblers are superstitious--more or less.
• A guy can't stay honest if he wants to.  That's what's the matter with this country.  He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does.  You gotta play the game dirty or you don't eat.
• The trouble with cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something they didn't have before.
• An empire can fall in a minute.
• A lie with a nod is still a lie, but it's an easy lie.

11/24/2012

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

• The world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.
• Gods make uncertain allies at best.
• What a man sows on his name day, he reaps throughout the year.
• A lady's armor is courtesy.
• Schemes are like fruit, they require a certain ripening.
• Even in the midst of war, certain decencies needed to be observed.
• Swearing don't make it true.
• There's no shame in fear, what matters is how we face it.
• Even the wisest man never knew whether his next harvest would be the last.
• Was there ever a war where only one side bled?
• Power resides where men believe it resides.
• He who hurries through life hurries to his grave.
• How can I lose something I have never owned?
• Hard places breed hard men, and hard men rule the world.
• Every morning brings a new day, much like the old.
• A man agrees with god as a raindrop with the storm.
• No man should live longer than his teeth.
• There are ghosts everywhere.  We carry them with us wherever we go.
• When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.
• The best lies contain within them nuggets of truth, enough to give a listener pause.
• The ones who look the most suspicious are likely innocent.  It's the ones who look innocent I need to beware.
• The gods made our bodies as well as our souls.  They give us voices, so we might worship them with song.  They give us hands, so we might build them temples.  And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.
• When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.
• I would sooner be up, though the world be dark, than lie restless abed, fretting on tasks undone.
• Nothing was simple and little was true.
• Searching is not finding.
• Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?
• Paint stripes on a toad, he does not become a tiger.
• One day she would allow herself to be less than strong.  But not today.  It could not be today.
• No one has ever died of restlessness, but rashness is another matter.
• In the songs all knights are gallant, all maids are beautiful, and the sun is always shining.
• Better to die free than live a slave.
• The wide world is full of people wanting to help.  Would that some could find the courage to help themselves.
• Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him.
• Fools believe in foolish things.
• What boy does not secretly wish to find hidden powers in himself?
• So long as there was magic, anything could happen.
• If you step in a nest of snakes, does it matter which one bites you first?
• A man should never refuse to taste a peach.  He may never get the chance again.
• Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure to hide the flavor of their own incompetence.
• A battle is not a war.
• It seems to me that it might be easier for one man to find two hundred than for two hundred to find one.
• No victory is without cost.
• Vows made at sword point are not valid.
• Have you ever considered that too many answers are the same as no answer at all?
• You served him valiantly, but when you seek to follow him into the earth, you serve no one.
• The longer you remain in one place, the easier it will be for your enemies to find you.
• A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good.  Each should have its own reward.
• Some men believe everything and some nothing.
• Some lights cast more than one shadow.
• It seems to me that most men are grey.
• If half of an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion.  A man is good, or he is evil.
• The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.
• The man who kills his own blood is cursed forever in the sight of gods and men.
• How can I do my duty if I do not know where it lies?
• Only cowards fight with fire.
• If you can't protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can.
• A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic...and the parts that look like magic often turn out to be messiest of all.
• In formal battle, discipline is more important than courage.
• Men fight more fiercely for a king who shares their peril than one who hides behind his mother's skirts.
• Will holding it secret in your heart make it any less true?  If you never tell, never speak of it, will it become only a dream, less than a dream, a nightmare half-remembered?
• Forbid her anything and it became her heart's desire.
• People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.
• Sooner madness than defeat.  Defeat is death and shame.
• If I'm to sit here like a stump, I had as well paint a target on my breastplate.
• You don't feel your wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat running down into your eyes.  You stop feeling, you stop thinking, you stop being you, there is only the fight, the foe, this man and then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you're not, you're alive, and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them laughing.
• Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray, stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day.  Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray, soothe the wrath and tame the fury, teach us all a kinder way.
• Wishing it were otherwise will not make it so.
• Terrible times breed terrible things.

1/8/2013

Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

• There are things to be learned even from the dead.
• It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your cups.
• Can a man still be brave if he's afraid? That is the only time a man can be brave.
• The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.
• A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.
• Easy to say, and harder to do.
• Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.
• Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.
• Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.
• Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.
• I will fight that battle when the enemy appears on the field.
• The gods mock the prayers of kings and cowherds alike.
• A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
• Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.
• Every flight begins with a fall.
• It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.
• A man must make his own choices. They earned the silver. How they spend it is no concern of mine.
• There's much to be said for taking people unawares. You never know what you might learn.
• Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side?
• Let them see that their words can cut you, and you'll never be free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make it your own. Then they can't hurt you with it anymore.
• If a man paints a target on his chest, he should expect that sooner or later someone will loose an arrow at him.
• We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we start to take ourselves too seriously.
• A lord needed to eat with his men, if he hoped to keep them.
• The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends.  It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.
• Minds are like swords, I do fear.  The old ones go to rust.
• Grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.
• All men carry murder in their hearts.
• Put not your trust in spiders.
• There's no honor in beating a fallen foe.
• The world was full of cravens who pretended to be heroes; it took a queer sort of courage to admit to cowardice.
• Silence sometimes yielded more than questions.
• Only a man who's been burned knows what hell is truly like.
• Every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes you better.
• All halls lead somewhere.  Where there is a way in, there is a way out.
• Even the finest of jugglers cannot keep a hundred balls in the air forever.
• When you find yourself in bed with an ugly woman, the best thing to do is close your eyes and get on with it.  Waiting won't make the maid any prettier.  Kiss her and be done with it.
• The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
• Some secrets are safer kept hidden.  Some secrets are too dangerous to share, even with those you love and trust.
• Love is sweet, but it cannot change a man's nature.
• Life is not a song, sweetling.  You may learn that one day to your sorrow.
• Sleep is the great healer.
• A true man does what he will, not what he must.
• Even the truest knight cannot protect a king against himself.
• A bruise is a lesson, and each lesson makes us better.
• Watching is not seeing.
• The heart lies and the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true.
• Fear cuts deeper than swords.
• Blood runs truer than oaths.
• Some commands are more easily given than obeyed.
• A man who won't listen can't hear.
• That was the trouble with the clans; they had an absurd notion that every man's voice should be heard in council, so they argued about everything, endlessly.
• All men must swallow the sour with the sweet.
• There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.
• As we sin, so do we suffer.  If that's true, why is it always the innocents who suffer most?
• A child sees an obstacle, and his first thought is to run around it or knock it down.  A lord must learn that sometimes words can accomplish what swords cannot.
• Some truths did not bear saying, and some lies were necessary.
• We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love.  That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.
• Times may change, but men do not.
• A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear.  And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it.
• A dead man is beyond fear.
• Fear can fever a man's mind and give him queer thoughts.
• A man who sees nothing has no use for his eyes.
•