David Wong Quotes

Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.

But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.

What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.

Start working on whatever you hesitate Because there is an ending to every beginning. When you make it to the end, You will realize the hesitation was a waste of time.

That ability to see the right choice, but not until several hours have passed since making the wrong one? That's what makes a person a dumbass, folks.

... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.

I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman’s window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It’s right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.

Cynicism does not cause inaction.

Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.

You're the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.

If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?

The man walked past me and stopped, observing the blood running down my neck. "Your injury. Let us tend to it." He looked out through the open doorway and silently gestured to someone out there. "Our world," he said, "is far more advanced than yours. For reasons you'll understand shortly." A thin, bony, naked woman entered the room, carrying two small, white kittens. She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left. "There," said the large man. "The kittens will make your sad go away.

Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don't?

He whipped the chair around and actually split one of the things in half with the impact, spilling the spray of blood that was reflective, like mercury. John bellowed, "Anyone else want to donate blood to chair-ity?" He ducked into the the door and bashed one monster right in the wig, screaming, "There's some dessert! With a chair-y on top!

Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.

You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose. Space is a puff of smoke, a wisp of cloud.

Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?

People come to have different moral beliefs because they have different non-moral beliefs about relevant facts. People are disposed to believe whatever justifies the practices and institutions that benefit them. But I argue that not all moral differences can be explained away in such a fashion. Some of the most profound disagreements come from differences in priority assigned to values such as relationship and community on the one hand, and individual rights and personal autonomy for the individual, on the other hand.

Accommodation is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible pressure if it always depended on strict agreement.

The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment?

We depend for so much on those we love that of course we want them to have desirable personal qualities and to believe that we do too. But if we pin our love for another, and theirs for us, based on personal qualities, it confers an unacceptable conditionality and substitutability on love: we don't want to be exchanged for a better model of whatever our lovers deem to be desirable, so there is a strong tendency to want: to be loved for no reason at all, simply be loved.

Learning what it is to be among other human beings includes learning that they can be different from us as well as similar. We imagine what it would be like to experience the world differently from their locations, nor our own. We might still use analogies to understand others, but analogies point to similarities that co-exist with differences. Similar in some respects is consistent with different in other respects.

And, well, that's my story," I said. "I'm sorry that it's so, you know. Retarded.

In fact, our need to feel like big shots keeps us wedded to inadequate perspectives on the world, keeps us from exploring and dealing with what doesn't fit into those perspectives. We should be trying to formulate a bigger, richer perspective to accommodate what doesn't fit, but no matter how beautiful and true that new perspective looks to us, we should always be prepared to acknowledge that it doesn't accommodate something we haven't yet confronted.