thestephb’s most recent Quotables

Nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff... Nerds are allowed to LOVE stuff. Like, jump up and down in your chair, can’t control yourself LOVE IT. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff’. Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness.’

I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

All salvation is temporary. A bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity: people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humourist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Suppose God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’d figure it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?"

What if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale?…Some species go for months without eating anything. Just completely idle.. So they have this incredible mental apparatus and no one has the least notion what they do with it. Lilly says that the most logical supposition, based on physiological and ecological evidence, is that they contemplate the universe…

You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you goodnight. And there’s a lot of difference.

Never mistake motion for action.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target that no one else can see.

Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men—the other 999 follow women.