But what QUOTES

3 " But ... but what if I hit you?”
A snort. “You’re not going to hit me.”
“How do you know?” I bristled at his amused tone. “I could hit you. Even master swordsmen make mistakes. I could get a lucky shot, or you might not see me coming. I don’t want to hurt you.”
He favored me with another patient look. “And how much experience do you have with swords and weapons in general?”
“Um.” I glanced down at the saber in my hand. “Thirty seconds?”
He smiled, that calm, irritatingly confident smirk. “You’re not going to hit me. "

― Julie Kagawa , The Iron Queen (The Iron Fey, #3)

4 " I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end. "

― Steven L. Peck , A Short Stay in Hell

5 " We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us. "

― Kamand Kojouri

6 " Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing? "

7 " You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever? "

― Jean Thompson , The Humanity Project

8 " Journeying through grief is one of the most " normal human" experiences you can have. Nevertheless, all too frequently the heartbroken seem to feel alienated by society. Unfortunately in our culture, we are taught to hold our feelings in. If someone asks us, " How are you doing today?" the expected answer is, " I'm okay." But what if you aren't okay? You obviously don't want to go into a monologue of why you're not okay, but sometimes you feel as if you're going to explode if you can't " tell off" that well-meaning person for even daring to ask you such a thing in the first place! "

9 " All the morning since he got up he had been trying to fight through his duties—leaning against a hope—a hope that first had bowed, and then had broke as soon as he really tried its weight. There was not a sign of Sylvia’s liking for him to be gathered from the most careful recollection of the past evening. It was of no use thinking there was. It was better to give it up altogether and at once. But what if he could not? What if the thought of her was bound up with his life; and that once torn out by his own free will, the very roots of his heart must come also? "

― Elizabeth Gaskell , Sylvia's Lovers

10 " One of the unique things about the human brain is that it can do only what it thinks it can do. The minute you say, " My memory isn't what it used to be ..." you are actually training your brain to live up to your diminished expectations.Low expectations mean low results.The first rule of super brain is that your brain is always eavesdropping on your thoughts. As it listens, it leans. If you teach it about limitation, your brain will become limited. But what if you do the opposite? What if you teach your brain to be unlimited? "

11 " As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here’s one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie...

I want it to be about the most horrible, treacherous aliens ever known to man who are about to destroy life as we know it, leading to the most spectacular thrill ride of an adventure with fantastic space battles and huge explosions and great special effects -- a white knuckle ride for the movie audience.

Yeah, but what’s it about?

I can write space battles with the best of them, but what makes that space battle interesting to me is: why are they fighting? What are the stakes? What does the hero lose if he loses? And what does he win if he wins? Why should we care?

I'm talking about the second level of story-telling. The level that examines what's going on inside the characters — their moral and ethical dilemmas, their doubts, fears, inner conflicts, how they change as the story progresses. These are the things that make us, as members of an audience, get emotionally involved. "

― Michael Piller , FADE IN: The Making of Star Trek Insurrection - A Textbook on Screenwriting from Within the Star Trek Universe

12 " People ask why my brother killed himself. " Why would such a gifted journalist, whose works have won all the prizes in the world, do such a thing?" " He had so many friends, why would he want to leave them?" " But what about all he had to live for?" In a short space of time, I had a drawerful of articles wirtten by reporters pondering the death of one who, like them, made a living out of trying to sort out the truth, separating fact from conjecture. They were hell-bent on making sense out of this event.When they phoned, I told them they were going to fail. I told them that the problem with suicide is that it is a senseless event. There is no why.But of course that's wrong. There are numerous whys, though it's almost impossible, or unlikely that any single one of them is " the answer" that people want to hear. "

13 " We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's—'

She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good... "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

14 " I love you enough to tell you the truth whether you want to hear it or not, but what you do afterward is your choice alone. "

― Ashley Ormon

15 " It was one thing to stay in one place If you were happy and fulfilled- that was simply living the good life. But what if you weren't fulfilled? "

― Syrie James , The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen

16 " We are made by the choices we make. We are defined, not by how or where we were born but what we make out of the " where" and " how" ; not much of how we started but more of how we decide to end. "

17 " You will always be a monster - there is no turning back from it. But what kind of monster you become is entirely up to you. "

― Julie Kagawa , The Eternity Cure (Blood of Eden, #2)

18 " Then Cynthia looked at him and smiled, and he knew he couldn’t possibly resist her, no matter what she had done. It felt as though the two of them had just stripped naked and dived off a high cliff over a beautiful river. The water below looked cool and inviting. But what if it was only six inches deep? "

19 " In addition to the transience of their members, churches themselves face a crisis of hypermobility. Many churches have put down only shallow roots in their neighborhood, or no roots at all. We’ve all heard the question, “If our church suddenly moved to a new location fifteen miles away, would anyone in our neighborhood notice we were gone?” But what if we asked ourselves this question: “If our church was magically lifted off the ground and moved to a location fifteen miles away, would we notice the difference?” Western churches have become so disentangled from their own places that this question could be a cold, hard look in the mirror for many faith communities. "

― C. Christopher Smith , Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

20 " Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience. "

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