"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Ernest Hemingway 'A Farewell to Arms"
"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
“The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.” -Ender Wiggin
From Ender's Game, not my favorite book, but it does have some pretty good lines
"The flight was uneventful enough, except the pilot accidentally touched down at a slightly wrong airport and forgot to lower the landing gear, so we left the plane by way of the emergency chute, and I lost my shoes."
"We long to be here for a purpose even though - despite much self-deception - none is evident. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is better than ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring faith."
"How long after all these buildings crumble, will these tombstones remain standing? How long after we're gone, will the dead remain?" Ctiy of the Dead Brian Keene
Pretty much sums up life: "Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun -- and neither can stop the march of events."
