A person's life should be like a prism: inhaling light [. . .] exhaling rainbows.
(Barron, T.A. Heartlight. Ace, 2003.)
Time is a lot of things people say that God is. There's the always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful - because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies.
And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.
And if Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil.
(Gabaldon, Diana. A Breath of Snow and Ashes. New York, New York: Random House, Inc., 2005. 1.)
It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
(Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York, New York: Riverhead Books, 2003. 1.)
Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to "see" others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.
(Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003. 315.)
As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it.
(Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2005. ix.)
Writing history often means covering up the past.
(Mal. Serenity. Universal Studios, 2005.)
What are facts to people like this? To most people? Just pegs to hang their feelings on, and who am I to call those feelings absurd? Feelings are facts too.
(Peters, Elizabeth. The Dead Sea Cipher. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1970.)
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest [person] in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest [person] in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class bad[person]dom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.
Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.
(Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books, 2000.)