Quotes About Impact

Self-immolation's a nice gesture, but it doesn't usually achieve very much.

I know what the right woman, at the right moment, can do to a man- not that Tessie seemed to have got away scot-free herself. Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you.

Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

Although I knew that quite possibly this would have made no difference to anything at all, in the long run, I couldn't help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.

I'd been expecting someone so nondescript he was practically invisible, maybe the Cancer Man from The X Files, but this guy had rough, blunt features and wide blue eyes, and the kind of presence that leaves heat streaks on the air where he's been.

Plenty of people have told me—and several of them even meant it as a compliment—that I have a God-given talent for fucking with people's minds; and what you can do to strangers is nothing compared to what you can do to your very own family.

She knows that killing a person does almost-invisible things to you; it leave you arm-linked with death, your head tilted just a degree that way, so that for the rest of your life your shadows mix together.

Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.

They say boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head, and it's the truth.

It feels like someone's using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you.

Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you.

You are the sum total of the people you meet and interact with in the world. Whether it's your family, peers, or co-workers, the opportunities you have and the things that you learn all come through doors that other people open for you.

What do they do for a village idiot when you're here?

But the abandonment need not have been real; a symbolic one, like moving all the time or having an unstable, unreliable, or emotionally distant parent, can have the same kind of emotional impact.

Thoughts have no power except the power we give them.

There are thousands of kids like us, working across the country to make a sweet for rich kids in other places. Thousands. It's a number that matters to me so much that I can't wrap my mind around it.

A few reasonable policies won't do much good if the surrounding society is insane.

The artist without social responsibility who provokes anger instead of dialogue threatens the field of discourse itself.

look at the company you work for and see what effect they are having on the environment and the people in that environment; see what damage is being done. Even if we personally are not doing anything wrong, if our livelihood is based on something even slightly harmful, subconsciously something happens. That mental state will always disturb our mind.

How was it possible that entire lives could change, could be destroyed, and that streets and buildings remained the same, she wondered.

Are we not forever shaped by our childhood, its scars, its secrets, its hidden pain?

The choices we make about the lives we live determine the kinds of legacies we leave.

When I was mad, I didn't raise my voice. Instead, I lowered it to a register that you heard with your bones, not your ears.