Humans Quotes - Page 32

• It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said. She laughed. 'Really?' The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.

  Iain Banks

  Letting Go, Regret, Hands

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• The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

  Janet Frame

  Cutting, Men, Hair

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• Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.

  Caroline Knapp

  Giving, Missing, Lovely

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• Are all humans human, or are some more human than others?

  Roméo Dallaire

  Debates of the Senate (Hansard) 3rd Session, 37th Parliament, Volume 141, Issue 28, sencanada.ca. March 31, 2004.

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• Mother, recently I have discovered the one way in which human beings differ completely from other animals. Man has, I know, language, knowledge, principles, and social order, but don't all the other animals have them too, granted the difference of degree? Perhaps the animals even have religions. Man boasts of being the lord of all creation, but it would seem as if essentially he does not differ in the least from other animals. But, Mother, there was one way I thought of. Perhaps you won't understand. It's a faculty absolutely unique to man - having secrets. Can you see what I mean?

  Osamu Dazai

  Mother, Mean, Men

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• For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they couldn't escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who couldn't defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.

  Patrick Süskind

  Brother, Hate, Heart

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• Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

  Steven Pinker

  Average, Principles, Groups

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.449, Penguin

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• Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.

  Victor Hugo

  Evil, Soul, Elements

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• Then I guess we cannot miss the famous festival in New Orleans," he found himself saying, just to take the shadows from her eyes. She was silent a moment, her fingers twisting in the blanket. "Do you mean it, Gregori? We can go?" "You know how much I love crowds of humans," he said, straight-faced. She laughed at him. "They don't bite." "I do," he said, the words low and soft, his silver gaze at once possessive.

  Christine Feehan

  Mean, Eye, New Orleans

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• Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine

  Cassandra Clare

  Valentine, Race, Identity

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.828, Simon and Schuster

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• For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

  Dorothy Allison

  Wall, Pain, Fall

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• All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Memories, Emotional, Long

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.33, Harper Collins

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• ...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

  Jacques Lacan

  Lying, Desire, Rooms

  Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller (1988). “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955”, p.223, CUP Archive

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• Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape—and words help to define those thoughts. That’s why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster’s mind.

  Jim Butcher

  Imagination, Magic, Mind

  Jim Butcher (2001). “Fool Moon: Book two of The Dresden Files”, p.94, Penguin

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• This particular type of human carries weapons slightly more lethal than your beloved pink monstrosity

  Kiersten White

  Weapons, Beloved, Type

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• You know, there’s something when you just know you fit together. And I fit with you. I don’t care what you are, human or anything else. It’s like a need, Maddy. So please.” He stopped and looked at her desperately. Nakedly. “Give me a chance, Maddy.

  Scott Speer

  Giving, Together, Needs

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• Ringo: 'I do get emotional when I think back about those times. My make-up is emotional. I'm an emotional human being. I'm very sensitive and it took me till I was forty-eight to realize that was the problem! We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write - we all wrote - about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.

  Ringo Starr

  Writing, Emotional, Thinking

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• There is a beautiful expression of this in the Chandogya Upanishad: 'There is this City of Brahman, (that is the body), and in this city there is a shrine, and in that shrine there is a small lotus, and in that lotus there is a small space, (akasa). Now what exists within that small space, that is to be sought, that is to be understood.' This is the great discovery of the Upanishads, this inner shrine, this guha, or cave of the heart, where the inner meaning of life, of all human existence, is to be found.

  Bede Griffiths

  Beautiful, Heart, Discovery

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• the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

  Charles Bukowski

  Dog, Moving, Light

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “You Get So Alone at Times”, p.21, Harper Collins

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• Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.

  Joko Beck

  Memories, Thinking, Imagination

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• I knew then that I had never understood what humans called love. But if that was anything close to the power you held over me, then no wonder they searched for it so passionately." I reached out and pulled him into bed with me. "You're going to be late." "Why ?" "Because after hearing that I can't let you leave until I've had my fill. Get naked, Dankmar.

  Abbi Glines

  Bed, Naked, Hearing

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• Greed may not be good, but it’s not so bad either. You humans think greed is just for money or power, but everyone wants something they can’t have.

  Hiromu Arakawa

  Thinking, Want Something, Greed

  "Fictional character: Greed". Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (Yaskusoku no hi), www.imdb.com. 2009-2010.

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• Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.’ – Book 3, Chapter 16

  Rafael Sabatini

  Book, Men, Hypocrisy

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• Not only does he hate me, and want to kill me, he no longer believes I'm human. It was less painful being strangled.

  Suzanne Collins

  Hate, Believe, Doe

  Suzanne Collins (2011). “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, p.1226, Scholastic Inc.

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• You and David could both be right. Maybe human beings are programmed … to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad, Tally. Besides, we had a whole city of pretties to choose from, and we chose each other."-Zane

  Scott Westerfeld

  Falling In Love, Cities, Helping

  Scott Westerfeld (2010). “Pretties”, p.250, Simon and Schuster

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