Lauren Bachman > Lauren's Quotes

“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith―acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.

Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“The human spirit craves for mastery over its carnal shell.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“Everything decayed, the perfectly ordered crystal eventually turned into random particles of dust.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“The mind is a golden capstone atop the physical body. The Philosopher's Stone. Through the staircase of the spine, energy ascends and descends, circulating, connecting the heavenly mind to the physical body.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“Chaos was the natural law of the universe. Indifference was the engine of entropy. Man's apathy was the fertile ground in which the dark spirits tended their seeds.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“The decisions of our past are the architects of our present.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“You are my inspiration and my guide, my Virgil and my Beatrice all in one, and this masterpiece is as much yours as it is mine. If you and I, as star-crossed lovers, never touch again, I shall find my peace in knowing that I have left the future in your gentle hands. My work below is done. And now the hour has come for me to climb again to the world above … and rebehold the stars.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“Yes, but the world is is large, and history is long.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data—offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order—creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“My friends, I am not saying I know for a fact that there is no God. All I am saying is that if there is a divine force behind the universe, it is laughing hysterically at the religions we’ve created in an attempt to define it.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“We exist with or without God. We are the inevitable result of entropy. Life is not the point of the universe. Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces in order to dissipate energy.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“At night, this is a heavier world.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.

The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt daily beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.

But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.

He said that when Narcissus died, the goddesses of the forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.

'Why do you weep?' the goddesses asked.

'I weep for Narcissus," the lake replied.

'Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus,' they said, 'for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand.'

'But... was Narcissus beautiful?' the lake asked.

'Who better than you to know that?' the goddesses asked in wonder. 'After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!'

The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:

'I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.'

'What a lovely story,' the alchemist thought.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Sometimes it's better to be with the sheep, who don't say anything. And better still to be alone with one's books. They tell their incredible stories at the time when you want to hear them. But when you're talking to people, they say some things that are so strange that you don't know how to continue the conversation.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Who reads? Not that I begrudge my life in book. All I know about the world I've learned from them. But a description of a tree is not a tree, and a thousand paper kisses will never equal the feel of Olly's lips against mine.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

“I was happy before I met him. But I’m alive now, and those are not the same thing.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

“Maybe I don't think the first part is the best part. Maybe I like the part later on. Hearing a song so many times you know all the little ins and outs of it. Experiencing something so many times that you can just... live in it. Maybe I like that better.”
― Emma Mills, Foolish Hearts

“They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War