💬 Quotes

"If you want to know who a person really is, don’t look at what they do when things are going right. Look at what they do when they’re cornered."

"The problem with a perfectly crafted lie is that it requires a perfectly crafted memory to sustain it."

"In this house, silence wasn't peace. It was just a place where secrets went to grow."

"We were two people playing a game of chess, except we had both convinced ourselves that we were the ones holding the board."

"He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember."

"You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to do."

"He had come to know that as he grew older he would not be able to rely upon the young, nor upon his contemporaries, but upon the dead, who were more real to him than the living."

"In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."

"It was a love of literature, of people, of life in its own becoming—a passion of the mind, purged of the trivialities of daily existence."

"What did you expect? ... He asked himself. He found no answer, but he felt a strange, quiet contentment, as if he had finally accepted the limits of his own existence."

"Every family has a secret, and every secret is just a dead body waiting for someone to trip over it."

"We are just the sum of all the people we have failed to kill."

"History isn't written by the victors; it's written by the people who have the most effective excuses."

"You can’t change the world, but you can certainly make sure it never forgets your name, even if it has to be etched in blood."

"To be born into a dynasty is to be born into a prison where the walls are made of other people's expectations."

"The greatest trick the world ever pulled was convincing us that 'normal' was anything more than a statistical anomaly."

"One man can reshape the world, if he has the right tools and the right focus."

"Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man."

"I’m a man, and they’re monsters. That’s the difference."

"Full circle, from the ashes of the old world to the beginning of a new one."