kate's quotes

(showing 1-44 of 44)

"Still indomitable was the reply -- "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad -- as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth -- so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane -- quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot." "
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

8 people liked it

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
"
— Angela Carter

tags: reading
28 people liked it

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)

32 people liked it

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

tags: fitzgerald
43 people liked it

"All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. "
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

16 people liked it

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
— Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl)

tags: hope, human, nature
475 people liked it

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all."
— Emily Dickinson

tags: feathers, hope, inspirational, souls
744 people liked it

"It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it."
— Frank Warren

tags: hope, pith
28 people liked it

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

tags: it-s-so-true
2,424 people liked it

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

tags: freedom, women, writing
437 people liked it

"My bursting heart must find vent at my pen."
— Abigail Adams

tags: historical, inspiring, literacy, women
37 people liked it

"You're only a man! You've not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!"
— Georgette Heyer (Powder and Patch)

tags: humor, men, thoughts, women
66 people liked it

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
— Joyce Carol Oates

tags: reading
472 people liked it

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."
— William Styron

tags: books, reading
642 people liked it

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

tags: books, reading
794 people liked it

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind."
— Cervantes (Don Quixote)

tags: books, humor, reading
321 people liked it

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

tags: art, craft, fiction, reading, writing
95 people liked it

"People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are."
— G.K. Chesterton

tags: literature, novels, reading
31 people liked it

"Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."
— Albert Einstein

56 people liked it

"For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. "
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

tags: books, reading, writing
7 people liked it

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor
9,712 people liked it

"Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood."
— Jane Yolen

42 people liked it

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

tags: confidence, inspirational, wisdom
10,831 people liked it

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

979 people liked it

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: books, classic, humor
5,734 people liked it

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will."
— Charlotte Brontë

tags: freedom, inspirational, literature
171 people liked it

"Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

tags: education, prejudice
29 people liked it

"The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth."
— Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

25 people liked it

"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
— William Blake

38 people liked it

"A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent."
— William Blake

tags: lies, logic, philosophy, religion, truth
95 people liked it

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: action, change, inspirational, philosophy, wish
11,991 people liked it

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

tags: frost, glitter, gold, lost, poetry, roots, strength, strong, wander, wither
6,483 people liked it

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

tags: advertising, apple, change, commercial, computers, different, madness, misfits, nonconformity, progressive, quo, rebels, status, think, troublemakers
7,332 people liked it

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

tags: best, life, love, mistakes, out-of-control, truth, worst
11,412 people liked it

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. "
— Plato

tags: love, poetry, song
709 people liked it

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

tags: freethinker, inspirational, mad
1,142 people liked it

"There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion."
— Audrey Hepburn

32 people liked it

"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

tags: love
53 people liked it

"Potential has a shelf life."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

tags: life, potential
14 people liked it

"Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

tags: hatred, love
13 people liked it

"There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

tags: men
4 people liked it

"Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans our of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

tags: boys, girls
1 person liked it

"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
— Erica Jong

tags: love
71 people liked it