When I was younger, I started writing down one quote from each book I read. I still do that. It doesn’t require too much effort, and I like to occasionally read through the quotes and revisit the books. One such good occasion is usually at the end of the year!
But first, I’d like to thank every reader of this little blog for their time reading my posts — it still feels a bit strange that people do that! I wish everyone a wonderful 2026.
Now, for the actual quotes! Sorted alphabetically by the author, in the same language in which I read the book. Previous editions are available on my website.
Quotes
Edit 3/2/2026: I missed 4 books because I saved the quotes to a different folder - Alderton - Everything I Know About Love, Green - The Anthropocene Reviewed, Greene - Brighton Rock, Rooney - Normal People, Wales - The Metropolitan Man. These quotes have now been added.
Alderton - Everything I Know About Love
I would happily take on the administrative weight of responsibility that comes with being an adult in exchange for the knowledge that I always have the freedom to go to the pub on my own and make friends with an old man any day of the week.
Alexander - Unsong
“Atheistic science should be thought of not as a literal attempt to say things like “space is infinite and full of stars” or “humankind evolved from apes” that were now known to be untrue, but as an attempt to record, in the form of stories, our ancestors’ answers to those great questions. When a scientist says “space is infinite and full of stars”, she does not literally mean that the crystal sphere surrounding the Earth doesn’t exist. She is metaphorically referring to the infinitude of the human spirit, the limitless possibilities it offers, and the brightness and enlightenment waiting to be discovered.”
Alexievich - Secondhand Time
“The Soviets returned to power…and that suitor of mine found me again. He showed up on horseback: ‘They’re interested in you.’ ‘Who?’ ‘What do you mean, who? The authorities.’ ‘I don’t care where I die. Let them send me to Siberia.’ ‘What kind of mother are you? You have a child.’ ‘You know whose it is…’ ‘I’ll marry you anyway.’ And so I married him. The man who murdered my husband.”
Applebaum - Autocracy, Inc.
“If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned. That requires not just surveillance, and not merely a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan, a narrative that damages the idea of democracy, wherever it is being used, anywhere in the world.”
Baldwin - Giovanni’s Room
“We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men, jostling each other on the wide sidewalk, and aiming the cherry-pips, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”
Cheng - Stories of Your Life and Others
“You won’t believe what my Natasha did today! We were at the playground, and another digient hurt himself when he fell and was crying. Natasha gave him a hug to make him feel better, and I praised her to high heaven. Next thing I know, she pushes over another digient to make him cry, hugs him, and looks to me for praise!”
Colwin - Happy All the Time
“When Holly was gone, Guido kept all the lights on and still everything looked dim. With Holly back, the one night-table lamp made the room look soft and warm.”
Dolan - Exciting Times
“Eventually Edith said: ‘When on earth did I say I’d forgiven you for lying?’
I said: ‘You said you wanted to meet him, and now you’ve met.’
‘Apologies if I’m being legalistic, but I don’t think that means I forgive you.’”
Green - The Anthropocene Reviewed
“They knew me far better than anyone in my real life. I remember one evening in an instant message conversation, I told my CompuServe friend Marie about the night feeling. The night feeling was my private name for the wave that crashed over me most school nights when I got into bed. My stomach would tighten and I’d feel the worry radiating out from my belly button. I’d never told anyone about the night feeling, and my heart was racing as I typed. Marie responded that she also knew the night feeling, and that she sometimes found comfort in listening quietly to her clock radio. I tried that, and it helped.”
Greene - Brighton Rock
‘I’m seventeen too,’ the Boy said, and the eyes which had never been young stared with grey contempt into the eyes which had only just begun to learn a thing or two.
Hession - Panenka
“Her mother had taught her about the value of an act of love every day, and had lived it too. But Marie-Therese could do all that stuff and feel no pulse of love in it, purely the mechanics of making the other person happy because things were easier that way.”
Iceman - Friendship is Optimal
“You saw Loki. Just from talking to the playtesters, he figured out that he was in a virtual world and figured out who the main world powers were.”
Kohák - Zelená svatožář
“U kořene problému — ať v životním prostředí či v systému lidského bytí, je představa, že stálé stupňování spotřební úrovně je smyslem života i účelem společnosti, který překoná všechny osobní i společenské problémy. Pokud lidé žijí v zajetí tohoto pojetí — a pokud je nezodpovědní demagogové přesvědčují, že mohou dravě hromadit a přenechat následky neviditelné ruce — je ochranářské úsilí marné a systémové řešení nemožné.”
Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
“In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.”
Lewis - The Undoing Project
“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
McKenna - Evenings and Weekends
“There are men with ties loosened, tongues loosened, men loose and loosening. Tops off, tops lost, tatoos in cursive fonts. Silver chains, gold chains, topless in the station.”
Montgomery - Anne’s House of Dreams
“At sunset the little soul that had come with the dawning went away, leaving heartbreak behind it”
Murakami - Norwegian Wood
“Here I was in my early twenties and the best part of my life was over. Do you see how terrible that would be? I had such potential, then woke up one day and it had gone. No more applause, no one would make a big fuss over me, no one would tell me how wonderful I was.”
Pelánek - Modelování a simulace
“Zkušenost s modelováním nás také učí pokoře, což je jeden z klíčových předpokladů moudrosti. Díky modelům víme, jak obtížné může být pochopit fungování i velmi jednoduchého systému. Při vytváření vlastních modelů velmi rychle zjišťujeme, že i ve věcech, o kterých jsme si mysleli, že jsou nám úplně jasné, máme docela zmatek.”
Plokhy - The Russo-Ukrainian War
“For many of Ukraine’s friends, this war became not only the largest and deadliest military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, but also the first major war since the victory over Nazism in which there were few shades of gray when it came to its moral dimensions. It was the first “good war” since the global conflict of 1939–45.”
Rooney - Normal People
I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born. Lots of people love you, Marianne. Okay? Your family and friends love you. For a few seconds she’s silent and then she says: You don’t know my family. He had hardly even noticed himself using the word ‘family’; he’d just been reaching for something reassuring and meaningless to say. Now he doesn’t know what to do. In the same strange unaccented voice she continues: They hate me.
Shelley - Frankenstein
“After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”
Wales - The Metropolitan Man
“You’re intelligent, driven, principled—” “Clark, I said I know my good qualities,” said Lois. She had to wonder whether any of that was what had attracted him, or if he’d simply caught a glimpse of her legs and worked backward from there.
Yudkowski - If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
“If everyone woke up one morning believing only a quarter of what we believe, and everyone knew everyone else believed it, they’d walk out into the street and shut down the datacenters, soldiers and police officers walking right alongside moms and dads. If they believed a sixteenth of what we believe, there would be international treaties within the month, to establish monitors and controls on advanced computer chips.”
“Tell me what you read…”
What does this selection tell about me? Something, I suppose. I asked Claude Opus1:
Your reading reveals someone preoccupied with how things are built—minds, political systems, relationships, knowledge itself—and the consequences of those constructions. There's a strong thread of AI and existential risk thinking, but it's woven together with political philosophy about authoritarianism and moral clarity in conflict, suggesting you're drawn to questions about coordination failures and collective action at civilizational scale. Alongside this runs a genuine interest in epistemology and intellectual humility: how paradigms resist change, how modeling teaches us we understand less than we thought, how even our stories about reality are just stories. But what keeps this from being purely abstract is a recurring attention to love and human connection—not romanticized, but examined: the difference between going through the motions and actually feeling something, the way presence transforms a room, finding understanding in unexpected digital spaces. The environmental philosophy and anti-consumerism texts point toward someone skeptical of growth-as-meaning narratives. Taken together, this is the reading list of someone who thinks seriously about large-scale risks and systemic dysfunction, but who hasn't let that crowd out an appreciation for small human moments and the texture of lived experience.
Sweet! Well, if Opus says so, I guess it’s true ;)
i will give you a collection of my book quotes and i want you to to analyze it and provide some insights about me based on which books i read and also the quotes i selected. keep it ~paragraph. do not fixate or overindex on specific books or quotes. try to find overarching themes. do not quote specific authors/books in the final paragraph.
Love the quotes, especially the one from John Green, it felt nice to recall the book. And you made me want to read Giovanni’s room now :)