c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Květniv’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.
— Carla H. Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth
Each day of the week, Kalist indulges himself in a different, secret ritual. On Mondays, he wears cologne. On Tuesdays, he eats meat for lunch. On Wednesdays, he places a bet after work. On Thursdays, he smokes one cigarette (but claims he’s not a smoker). On Fridays, he treats himself to his favourite pastime: horse practice – he grew up with horses and likes to try and emulate their distinctive whinnies, snorts, neighs, snuffles, sighs, grunts, fluttering nostrils, the occasional aggressive outburst and the especially beautiful nicker of a mare to her foal. And, on Saturdays, lest we forget, Maxwell D. Kalist drinks wine from a chalice.
— Carla H. Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth
Slogans seem to be dead
—  this world is now busy chanting fears of lost democracy
Doubt is a disease that infects the mind creating a mistrust of peoples motives and ones own perceptions. Doubt has the ability to call into questions everything you ever believed about someone and reinforce the darkest suspicions of our inner circle.
— Emily Thorne
I think to myself: I don't want to survive this oneI want to burn up in the wreckage
— Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
She lit my soul and inhaled deeplyFlicking my ashes occasionally.
— Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
Freedom was the price of privacy.
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
Silly. Dark isn’t scary. Dark is safe.”“Why?” “I live in the dark all the time. But when it’s dark outside everyone has to be there, too. And if you can’t see someone, they can’t see you, either.” She sniffles a few times. “So, it’s like I’m hiding in the dark?”“Yes. You’re the secret when it’s dark. Dark is safe.
— Kiersten White, Mind Games
I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.
— Stephen King, The Dark Half
Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.
— China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
I'm as lucky as a bed of oysters on cioppino night.
— Nenia Campbell, Touched with Sight
He peered into the night-dark windows of the afflicted girls, whispering names and stirring fits into their dreams until their own screams awakened them. The girls concocted fantastic stories of witches and curses and torture at the hands of specters. More accusers joined their ranks without his nurturing, puppets of their own envy. Such imagination, such dedication to the destruction of their own. And all in his name. It touched his dark soul.
— Susan Catalano, The Timeless Ones
The phone rang. Softly, in actuality, yet it seemed loud and ominous, as phones do at night in dark hotel rooms.
— Jim Thompson, The Nothing Man
She’s contemplative; I can feel the air around her thick with her thoughts. “No,” she says at last, “I want to believe you’re being sincere but I know you’re not. So I say no, because even if I allow myself to fantasize a little about our lives in a cabin on the beach, I still find myself being left by you. There’s almost no scenario I can think of where we live happily ever after.”“There could be,” I tell her and mean it at the moment. Maybe mean it for longer. Her fingers stop moving and she sighs. I open my eyes and she’s staring down at me. The lights have come on around the parking lot and one of them shines directly into her face. She angelic, a neon seraphim under the brilliant skies of the spring. I can see us on our boat, eating our hand picked clams on the fire behind our place. I can see it so vividly I’m almost sure it’s happened.
— Jaden Wilkes, Therapist
All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.
— Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory
Maybe princes aren’t real,” Sada said. Her eyes were crafty and sad at the same time. “But monsters are.” She opened her mouth wide and showed Azhar the wildflowers sitting on her tongue.
— Mercedes M. Yardley, Beautiful Sorrows
Death has a life which kills everybody's life
— Munia Khan
Every cloud of confetti has a dark lining.
— Lara Biyuts, Through The Baltic Looking-Glass
In the dark you hear movement—a squeak, a hiding. The heart opens, closes, opens.
— Arkaye Kierulf
Call it sentimentality. Call it curiosity. Just don't call it madness.
— Megan Shepherd, Her Dark Curiosity
Just one thing worse than the dark, ain't there? And that's what's inside it - the things that call it home ...
— Joseph Delaney, I Am Alice
I capture women. I break them down. And I rebuild them. And I am not a good man.
— Lily White
And it was darkSo dark at nightAnd we held on to each otherLike brother to brotherWe promised our mothers we'd writeAnd we would all go down together
— Billy Joel
I'm goin past factories. Boxes of metal with people inside. Souls bein ripped apart.
— Ian  Ayris
It's kind of hard to outlive your past
— Richelle Mead, Vampire Academy
Let Death Bless Me With You
— HIM
I cannot escape it, what I’ve done, no matter how far Ifollow the tunnel. I am alone with my sin. This is why they rule. The Peerless Scarredknow that dark deeds are carried through life. They cannot be outrun. They must beworn if one is to rule. This is their �rst lesson.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
The most fearsome monsters of all may inhabit the dark corners of our mind waiting for us to release them through our believes and gullibility. the phenomenon feeds on fear and believe. Sometimes it destroys us altogether other times it leads us upwards into the labyrinth of electromagnetic frequencies that form a curtain in the area we call windows and stalk us to drink our blood and create all kinds of mischievous beliefs and misconceptions in our feeble little terrestrial minds.
— John A. Keel, The Best of John Keel: Volume I
And in the darkness, he found reality.
— Evan Grinde, Chasing Oblivion
Do you know what it’s like, to hide in the shadows until your soul starts to blend into the darkness?
— Maverick Myth novel
Abstraction automatically gives rise to optimized solutions within the universal set of all possible solutions, as has been shown in this book. It is these optimized solutions that make up and drive the non-abstract parts of the world, while the non-optimized solutions remain ‘hidden’ from the material world, inside the abstract world.Starting from a basis of no postulation, we build our theory. As we go on piling up possibilities, we come to a similar basis for understanding the four non-contact forces of nature known till date. The difference in ranges of these forces is explained from this basis in this book. Zero postulation or abstraction as the basis of theory synthesis allows us to explore even imaginary and chaotic non-favoured solutions as possibilities. With no postulation as the fundamental basis, we are thus able to pile up postulated results or favoured results, but not the other way round. We keep describing such implications of abstraction in this book. We deal with the abstraction of observable parameters involved in a given system
— Subhajit Ganguly
Do not mock my baby." He pulls away and strokes his palm over he seat. "She was my first love.""Well your current ... er ... girl, is getting jealous with all the attention you're paying your first love, and she has orifices you can stick things in without having your boy bits burnt off."He pulls me into him again and his mouth goes to work on my neck. “Fuck I love it when you talk dirty.
— Carmen Jenner, Welcome to Sugartown
Her screams spiraled up into the night air
— Holly Black
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may, swell.
— Henry Ward Beecher
The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism
— Jean-Paul Sartre
In his failure Nhu had withdrawn so far into himself that in the end his face was a mask that no longer opened onto the real world.
— Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
Life and summer are fleeting,’ sang the bird. ‘Snow and dark, and the winter comes. Nothing remains the same.
— Elyne Mitchell, Silver Brumby's Daughter
Despite all the dark armor, the kohl liner, the black boots and chains, she saw him clearly now. She’d peered through the curtain of that cruel calmness, through the death stare and the vampire sentiments and angst and, behind it all, had found true beauty.
— Kelly Creagh, Nevermore
No wonder God chose this dark land to send prophets to, for a candle only shines in the dark.
— Rami Ollaik, The Bees Road
His fingers caressed the column of my tense throat. I shivered in fear. I hated not being able to see what was happening, it forced me to feel everything.
— C.J. Roberts
To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus...
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Sometime [Queen Mab] driveth o'er a soldier's neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,Of healths five fathom deep; and then anonDrums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or twoAnd sleeps again
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
He begins to want. He begins to crave. He wants to possess. His mind finally begins to process, to think and plan...He gives her his darkest, most serious look. He's telling her 'get ready, here we go.
— Donya Petrock, Six Ways from Sunday
Who do you think's after you, Shane, my lad? Or is it just the dark you're afeared of?
— Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground
Rahul’s great idea, he said that having either darkness or too much white made someone’s sanity decay and made them easier to manipulate. In the dark, though, they felt they could hide, and in Rahul’s words... 'They can hide, but they can’t run' he used that like a mantra.
— Mercy Cortez, Messy and Shattered
Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?
— Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited
All right,” she said a little sarcastically. “I was going to assume you liked eating babies and sacrificing virgins, but I might as well ask, what do you do for fun?”“I languish in sin,” I replied in the same tone. “I take my babies rare, and my virgins over easy.
— Nenia Campbell, Armed and Dangerous
The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited
Well, I don't know, Lina. But let's just say I've met a lot of dead people.
— Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray
Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited
I've never been scared of the dark, but I'm still terrified of what's in it.
— Elizabeth Duivenvoorde
Now you make yourself come, bitch. And I'll know if you're faking. You make that cunt clench around my cock or I swear to God I'll make you regret it
— Cara McKenna, Willing Victim
The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society, and even to God.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Master of the Dark Shadow. For I also, Niniel, had my darkness, in which dear things were lost; but now I have overcome it, I deem.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin
You are gone! Sky looks dark, ground looks dirty and I feel lost.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
There might be a million wrong people in your life, but when the right one comes everything looks dark.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Time seemed to drag with dreamlike slowness, like a knife through cold honey, and the room took on a surreal golden sheen as if I was looking through that same jar of honey. Maybe at that moment, the sun shone just right though the grimy windows, but the woman, the shelves, the jars, everything in the room appeared in tones of gold and sepia, except for the painting behind the counter. From behind the shopkeeper's head, a fluorescent Mary and Jesus glared at me, their cartoon-like faces reproaching me for being there.
— Sara  Stark, Couillon
But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.
— H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft:  The Complete Fiction
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil...who put darkness for light and light for darkness...who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight." Issiah 5:20,21
— Nikki Rosen, In The Eye Of Deception: A True Story
Despite their macabre imaginations, they don't believe the things they say, all those things about magic and fantômes. But I do. I know he lingers. I've heard his voice, soft as a lover's whisper.
— Sara  Stark, Couillon
Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.
— Tim Burton
I didn’t look back, but I knew you were still watching. It probably sounds weird, but I could just feel it. The hairs on my neck bristled when you blinked.
— Lucy Christopher, Stolen: A Letter to My Captor
Ty?” I said, trying out your name, liking the way it sounded. “So what’s it like anyway? Australia?”You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.“You’ll find out,” you said.
— Lucy Christopher, Stolen: A Letter to My Captor
I didn’t want the person standing there, beside the bed, to have the same face I’d found so attractive at the airport. But you were there all right: the blue eyes, blondish hair, and tiny scar. Only you didn’t look beautiful this time. Just evil.
— Lucy Christopher, Stolen: A Letter to My Captor
Your eyes were too intense to stare into for long.
— Lucy Christopher, Stolen: A Letter to My Captor
There’s this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.In death Rose became Linden’s parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
I remember the lights turning into blurs of blazing fire. I remember the air-conditioning chilling my arms. The smell of coffee smudging into the smell of eucalyptus.
— Lucy Christopher, Stolen: A Letter to My Captor
A mud-stained sunlight began to splatter the sodden fields, and the hateful, nasal world of birds began to come to life. It seemed to me that I was coming out of a suffocating nightmare and that the low clouds flying before the wind were the shreds of an evil dream.
— Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine
It’s more eerie to be alone in a city that’s lit up and functioning than one that’s a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards.
— Isaac Marion, The New Hunger
He was the monster that no one thought to look for in the light of day. It was a common mistake. People often believed they were safer in the light, thinking monsters only came out at night. But safety - like light - is a facade. Underneath, the whole world is drenched in darkness.
— C.J. Roberts
I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
What about nightmares? Have you experienced sexual dreams of a dark nature?
— S.M. Reine
Nothing nice happens to murdered women.
— Richard Kadrey
Suddenly exhausted, she closes her eyes and slips into nightmares again. Graveyards rising out of the ocean. Her friends’ corpses in the light of their burning school. Skeletons ripping open men's chests and crawling inside. She endures it patiently, waiting for the horror film to end and the theater to go dark, those precious few hours of blackout that are her only respite.
— Isaac Marion, The New Hunger
The only way to truly be safer, was to accept the dark, to walk in it with eyes wide open, to be a part of it. To keep your enemies close.
— C.J. Roberts, Captive in the Dark
The day we stop learning is the day we die.
— Michael Scott, The Warlock
Like a Falcon, she needed the dark to understand who her master was. She would learn to trust him, to rely upon him, to anticipate what he wanted from her. And like any master with his salt, he would reward her for her obedience. He would be exceedingly firm, but he would also be as fair as he could be. He had notchosen the instrument of his revenge at random. He had chosen a beautiful submissive. And what was a submissive if not adaptable -if not a survivor?
— C.J. Roberts, Captive in the Dark
What about the future?""We'll talk about the future when it gets here.
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Queen of the South
Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.
— Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Whoever lived in that apartment had a security gate, blinds that were closed and curtains drawn.  It's probably darker in there than it is in Hollister.
— Cara Lynn Shultz, Spellcaster
No fear is unbearable, she concluded, unless you've got time on your hands and a healthy imagination.
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Queen of the South
It goes so fast, he thought, they don't tell you that, how fast it goes...
— S.E. Hinton, Hawkes Harbor
He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...
— Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
— Jean Baudrillard
An ordinary man can enjoy breakfasting on juice and rye bread.But when you are underfed, scorned, miserable or just plain bored, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food.You want something a little more colourful, exciting, tastier, meatier and juicier.
— R.S. Vern, The Unconventional Life of Haee
It was getting dark by the time I went out, and nobody who knows the country will need to be told how black is the darkness of a November night under high laurel bushes and yew-trees. I walked into the heart of the shrubberies two or three times, not seeing a step before me, till I came out upon the broader carriage-road, where the trees opened a little, and there was a faint grey glimmer of sky visible, under which the great limes and elms stood darkling like ghosts; but it grew black again as I approached the corner where the ruins lay. ("The Open Door")
— Mrs. Oliphant, The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies
Perfect, complete, needing nothing, simply all there was, was the dark.
— Laurell K. Hamilton
It was darker in the tower than any place Devnee had ever been. The dark had textures, some velvet, some satin. The dark shifted positions.The dark continued to breathe. The breath of the tower lifted her clothing like the flaps of a tent, and sounded in her ears like falling snow.It's the wind coming through the double shutters, Devnee told herself.But how could the wind come through? There were glass windows between the inside and outside shutters.Or were there?The windows weren't just holes in the wall, were they?What if there was no glass? What if things crawled through those open louvers, crept into the room, blew in with the cold that fingered her hair? What creatures of the night could slither through those slats?She had not realized how wonderful glass was, how it protected you and kept you inside.She knew something was out there.
— Caroline B. Cooney, Evil Returns
Flying high in the dark sky, crazy and free, I was happy visiting the worlds and giving death or madness to the people. Either was liberation.
— Lara Biyuts. Vampire Armastus
We walked back the way we came, and even though it was dark there were no lights burning inside the houses. They were like people without hearts; raspberry tarts without the jam.
— Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark
I am a dead man alive.
— Santosh Kalwar, I Am Dead Man Alive
Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love... That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don't have enough of their own.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove.O no, it is an ever-fixed markThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;It is the star to every wand'ring bark,Whose worth's unknown, although his height be t
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Sometimes the prize is not worth the costs. The means by which we achieve victory are as important as the victory itself.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
Sometimes talking to you is like talking to myself: pretty damned annoying.
— Richelle Mead, Last Sacrifice
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version
The Quiet WorldIn an effort to get people to lookinto each other’s eyes more,and also to appease the mutes,the government has decidedto allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup.I am adjusting well to the new way.Late at night, I call my long distance l
— Jeffrey McDaniel, Forgiveness Parade
Тhere isnʹt much I wouldnʹt do for you. Тhe stupider, the better.
— Richelle Mead, Last Sacrifice
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?
— Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
Do you see, Harry? Do you see the flaw in my brilliant plan now? I had fallen into the trap I had foreseen, that I had told myself I could avoid, that I must avoid.”“I don’t —”“I cared about you too much,” said Dumbledore simply. “I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.“Is there a defense? I defy anyone who has watched you as I have — and I have watched you more closely than you can have imagined — not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered. What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy? I never dreamed that I would have such a person on my hands.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
But once in a while . . . I don't know. I feel so close, Rose. So close to the edge. Like if I allow myself one small misstep, I'll plunge away and never come back. It's like I'll lose myself.
— Richelle Mead, Last Sacrifice
Blood fills my mouth. Fire sears my veins. I choke back a howl. The silver knife slips--thechoice is mine.I am death or life. I am salvation or destruction. Angel or demon.I am grace.I plunge in the knife.This is my sacrifice--I am the monster.
— Bree Despain, The Dark Divine
Helmer: I would gladly work night and day for you. Nora- bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves.Nora: It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.
— Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
I’d rather spend the rest of my life without ever seeing you again,” he says, “than watch them destroy you because of me.
— Sangu Mandanna, The Lost Girl
When you know who matters most to you, giving things up, even yourself, doesn’t really feel like a sacrifice.
— Kiera Cass, The Heir
It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
But he was there.Day and night he was there for me,risking his very existence to protect me from a war that claimed my life over and over again.He never faltered,never wavered,never feared for his own safety.He was beaten,stabbed,abused, and tortured again and again,yet he still stuck by me,ignoring the possibility that he would die for me one day. It wasn't right. I didn't deserve everything he sacrificed for me.I wasn't worth so high a price.
— Courtney Allison Moulton, Angelfire
SNAPE: Sometimes costs are made to be borne.
— Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Parts One and Two
Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I'll be damned if I'll let you sacrifice me!
— Georgette Heyer, Black Sheep
Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.
— Tana French, The Likeness
You can sacrifice and not love. But you cannot love and not sacrifice.
— Kris Vallotton
Also … the plan sounded exactly like the sneaky, twisted, ridiculously annoying and noble sort of thing Leo Valdez would do.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Phury knelt beside him and stroked his face. "I've only ever had you to live for. If you die I have nothing.I'm utterly lost. And you are needed here." Zsadist tried to reach out, but couldn't lift his arms as Phury stood up. "God, Z, I keep thinking this tragedy of ours is going to be over. But it just keeps going, doesn't it?" Zsadist blacked out to the sound of his twin's boots heading from the room.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Awakened
Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
What about you?You stay by my side day and night and take the hardest hits of them all.Why,Will?Why have you stayed with me all these centuries?You watch me die again and again,yet you never leave. You keep trying to save me, even though you know I'm doomed. All because some angel told you to?Come on.No more secrets,you said.Tell me.
— Courtney Allison Moulton, Angelfire
I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved.
— Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958
Oftentimes winning can become an addiction, whether good or bad, to the point where you would rather lose it all before you lose at all.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. And when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Mom's eyes held yours for a moment. 'I don't like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.' Mom's expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, 'If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?
— Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
The only honorable, desirable kind of fear that shouldn't be feared is the fear of harm on a loved one. It's the kind of fear that leads to self-sacrifice and the kind of fear where you would truly jump in front of a bus to save another.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
I’m willing to walk in darkness if it keeps humans in the light.
— Victoria Schwab, Our Dark Duet
Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
If giving my everything is what it takes, I won't hesitate, not for even a second. That's what it means to have something you'd give your life to keep safe.
— Kyuugou, ACID TOWN
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches
— Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World
When angels' tears do flood the earth, the gates of hell shall see rebirth. Wheh the demise of angels doth impend , the human boy shall meet his end' Halo -Alexandra Adornetto
— Alexandra Adornetto
Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope.What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
From out of nowhere, Phury felt an overwhelming tide of guilt, like someone had popped the lid off allhis deepest concerns and his fears for the future of the race. He had to respond to it, couldn't bear thepressure. Riding the wave, he found himself saying in a rush, "We live and die for our kind. The species is our firstand only concern. We fight every night and count the jars of thelessers we kill. Stealth is the way weprotect the civilians. The less they know about us, the safer they are. That is why we disappeared.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Awakened
Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." How often I think of that 'ought.' No sugary sentiment there. Just the stern, glorious trumpet call, OUGHT. But can words tell the joy buried deep within? Mine cannot. It laughs at words.
— Amy Carmichael
That is why your sacrifice was all the more difficult. You chose to be a hero not through enchantment but through your own manhood.
— Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron
All the world seemed suddenly dream, for in what waking world would a prince deceive his own people for the benefit of a slave? ~ Ayden
— Rachel Haimowitz, Counterpoint
Why you keep telling me to be careful, Old man ?Your stupidity doesn't deserve my sacrifice, Kiddo.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Emeth came walking forward into the open strip of grass between the bonfire and the Stable. His eyes were shining, his face was solemn, his hand was on his sword-hilt, and he carried his head high. Jill felt like crying when she looked at his face. And Jewel whispered in the King's ear, "By the Lion's Mane, I almost love this young warrior, Calormene though he be. He is worthy of a better god than Tash.
— C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
If people knew what they were missing, they would give up everything they have to achieve it.
— Belsebuub
A man doesn't have to be alive to start the fires of revolution.
— Karen Hancock, The Light of Eidon
Price ain't merely about numbers. It's a satisfying sacrifice.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly; it's dearness only that gives everthing its value.
— Thomas Paine
I expect God to use me, not because of who I am but because of who Jesus is. Not because of what I've done, but because of what Jesus has done.
— Rick Warren
Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she'd never see again. She took every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind.
— Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows
It’s one thing to go into a fight knowing you’ll probably lose. Quite another to be told that to win, you must offer up your throat to be slit.
— Darren Shan, Demon Apocalypse
Sometimes in life, you do things you don’t want to. Sometimes you sacrifice, sometimes you compromise. Sometimes you let go and sometimes you fight. It’s all about deciding what’s worth losing and what’s worth keeping.
— Lindy Zart, Complete
Cathy smiled back ‘Rules were meant to be broken.’‘Don’t disagree,’ Oversteegen replied immediately. ‘Indeed they are. Providin’, however, that the one breakin’ the rules is willin’ t’ pay the price for it, and the price gets charged in full. Which you were, Lady Catharine. I saluted you for it then–at the family dinner table that night, in fact. My mother was infinitely more indisposed thereafter; tottered back t’ her bed cursin’ me for an ingrate. My father was none too pleased either. I salute you for it, again. Otherwise, breakin’ rules becomes the province of brats instead of heroes. Fastest way I can think t’ turn serious political affairs int’ a playpen. A civilized society needs a conscience, and conscience can’t be developed without martyrs—real ones—against which a nation can measure its crimes and sins.
— David Weber, Crown of Slaves
Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the 'wee ones,' because there are little children and big children. All people are 'wee ones.' And I'll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it
—  but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.
Sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elect of each generation suffers for the salvation of the rest.
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel
To do something for someone or something you loved- England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history- wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.
— Connie Willis
It is a great priviledge to hear from the mouth of an initiate what struggles we are ensnared in and what the meaning is of the sacrifices we are required to make before veiled images. Even if we should hear something evil, it would still be a blessing to see our task as something beyond a senseless cycle of recurrence.
— Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
Nothing is for free, even in heaven.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Life is like a film screen: pictures come, make an impression, go, and then make a place for new pictures with new impressions which obscure the previous ones. Some of those old pictures fade, but the impressions they leave will never pass away. Such an impression is the image of Hein Sietsma -- a joyful Christian who loved life so much but was still willing to give it to the great, good, and holy cause.
— Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say
In the final analysis, with Rene she had been an apprentice to love, she had loved him only to learn how to give herself, enslaved and surfeited, to Sir Stephen.
— Pauline Réage
I didn't know if it was possible to kick someone hard enough to knock the cocky out of 'em, but for Rowan I was willing to try.
— Stacey Rourke, Sacrifice
But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright.
— Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World
Do not cry for me, Azrael. Do not waste your tears. You made your decision. And this is mine. Sacrifice seems to be my destiny. A funny thing for a selfish man, isn't it? They always called me weak back then...
— Melissa de la Cruz, The Van Alen Legacy
I see a girl, soon to be a woman," Tibb continues. "The girl who will share your life. She will love you, she will betray you, and finally she will die for you. And it will all have been for nothing. All for nothing in the end.
— Joseph Delaney, Attack of the Fiend
I don't have a life of my own. I've put myself and my life at the service of the people. If necessity dictates I run, I run.. go to jail, I go to jail.. die, I die.My private aspirations are exactly the general aspirations of the people.
— Yusuf Idris, City of Love and Ashes
In a pocket of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim.You promised not to do that, the boy said.What?You know what, Papa.He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy's cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back.I have to watch you all the time, the boy said.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
The underlying logic of sacrifice was always the same: In order to gain the god's goodwill, destroy what you value most.
— Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth
The men stop coming after Hunt goes missing. We learned from the last brave soul to visit that they whispered all sorts of stories to answer his disappearance. My favorite is that we ate him. We cooked him up with our whore-earned corn, a dozen rats’ eyes, and a bat wing. Even I couldn’t have thought of anything more perfect.
— Rachel A. Marks, Winter Rose
On the Russian revolutionaries:To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, makes for a league of more practical proof than any religious order.
— Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.
— David James Duncan, The Brothers K
This is something an ordinary man can never know. You will enter the House of Dreams, Juanito, where you will live forever. Your mother and father and sisters and brothers, your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all you will greet in their dreams. And only you, among them, will be safe.
— Barry Gifford, Perdita Durango
I don't mind loosing when the other person need for winning is more than mine.....
— Adil Adam Memon
All due respect to Romeo and Juliet, but I don’t think love is sacrifice at all. Real love is when you let another person make you better. You don’t lose yourself in love—you find yourself there.
— William Ritter, The Dire King
Are you going to let me be eaten?' Billy Beecham looks stunned.'Don't you know that sometimes Beast collectors get collected?' I ask him.'But you're a virgin.''Virgins were never sacrifices,' I say. "Not to this kind of Beast. Virgin are collaborators.
— Maria Dahvana Headley, Unnatural Creatures
Are you going to let me be eaten?' Billy Beecham looks stunned.'Don't you know that sometimes Beast collectors get collected?' I ask him.'But you're a virgin.''Virgins were never sacrifices,' I say. "Not to this kind of Beast. Virgins are collaborators.
— Maria Dahvana Headley, Unnatural Creatures
Rose pivoted. “Alainn, can I ask you something about ethics?” Alainn nodded, slowly. “Sure.” Rose’s inhuman eyes met hers, and she asked, “Would you die to save a million people?
— Rita Stradling, Ensnared
Nothing shows our hearts like sacrifice. When we are willing not only to give from our excess, but to embrace some personal loss or disadvantage for the sake of showing generosity toward others, we say loudly and clearly…that we have a greater love than ourselves and our comforts.
— David Mathis, Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines
It is the grace of God that frees a soul from selfishness and empowers not just generosity, but sacrifice. And such sacrifice God will not overlook. In faith our giving to meet others’ needs becomes an occasion for more divine grace to flood our souls.
— David Mathis, Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines
The kingdom of God is an upside-down kingdom. It beckons us to gamble all, to trust radically, to come and die so that we might live--to give our lives away. Giving life away is a paradox. It's losing so we can win. It's giving so we can receive. It's risking for security. It's faith. The kingdom of God means living that tension.
— Ken Wytsma, Pursuing Justice: The Call to Live and Die for Bigger Things
She wanted to freeze the hands of time. Wanted to revisit, revise and rewrite the past…edit out the monsters hell-bent on taking the lives of everyone she loved.
— R. W. Patterson, Dark Night of the Soul: In the darkest of moments...a sacrifice to end a life...a rescue to save a soul.
To sacrifice one's unhappiness for a good cause is something I fervently believe in.
— Marty Rubin
Happiness requires the ultimate sacrifice: to give up one's unhappiness.
— Marty Rubin
Rose: A real sacrifice is giving up something you want or enjoy very much, isn't it?Alec: Yes.Rose: Doing it one's own self because one loves another person very much and wants her to be happy?Alec: Yes.Rose: And doing it pleasantly, and being glad about it, and not minding the praise if it doesn't come?Alec: Yes dear, that is the true spirit of self-sacrifice...
— Louisa May Alcott
My life to yours. My breath beecome yours.
— Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker
My life to yours. My breath become yours.
— Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker
I can't let the killing go on. No more death, not because of me. This is the only way. You and I both know it. Eio.
— Jessica Khoury, Origin
How many have died that I might live?And who has died that I might live?
— Jessica Khoury, Origin
The noblest life is the one laid down for another.
— Jessica Khoury, Origin
It’s like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don’t you see, that’s a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.
— Benjamin Percy, The Dead Lands
The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.
— Annie Cohen-Solal, Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life