Emily's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 193)

"Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

tags: bailey, happiness, loser, sisterhood
106 people liked it

"Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don’t rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you’re doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry?

You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you , but now you’ll never know."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

79 people liked it

""She was illusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.""
— Jerry Spinelli

tags: stargirl
61 people liked it

"Write about the emotions you fear the most."
— Laurie Halse Anderson

60 people liked it

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

tags: love
632 people liked it

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

144 people liked it

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

101 people liked it

"“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”"
— Milan Kundera

55 people liked it

"A single metaphor can give birth to love."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

32 people liked it

"In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

23 people liked it

"We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

8 people liked it

"She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

27 people liked it

"I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

8 people liked it

"There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

31 people liked it

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

73 people liked it

"...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

tags: writing
27 people liked it

"It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

33 people liked it

"Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

tags: solipsism
42 people liked it

"Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed; finally, you had to measure yourself by other people--there really was nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

10 people liked it

"...finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself."
— Ian McEwan

13 people liked it

"It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

tags: alone, children
10 people liked it

"In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

5 people liked it

"How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

5 people liked it

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. "
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

tags: daydreaming, dreams, fantasy, imagination, life
16 people liked it

"... c'est peut-être ça la vie : beaucoup de désespoir mais aussi quelques moments de beauté où le temps n'est plus le même. C'est comme si les notes de musique faisaient un genre de parenthèses dans le temps, de supension, un ailleurs ici même, un toujours dans le jamais.

Oui, c'est ça, un toujours dans le jamais."
— Muriel Barbery (L'élégance du hérisson)

4 people liked it

"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't."
— Vladimir Nabokov

tags: lolita
10 people liked it

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

tags: amazing, writing
113 people liked it

"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

tags: humbert, love
80 people liked it

"There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

13 people liked it

"There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

tags: happiness, hope, longing
7 people liked it

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

tags: life
6,916 people liked it

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."
— Leonardo da Vinci

tags: art, poetry
334 people liked it

""I didn't care who kissed you first as long as I kissed you last."
-George from If We Kiss"
— Rachel Vail

tags: love
38 people liked it

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

tags: einstein, human, humor, infinity, nature, philosophy, science, stupidity, universe
11,724 people liked it

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

tags: dance, heaven, hurt, inspirational, life, love, sing
15,664 people liked it

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: cry, crying, experience, happiness, joy, life, optimism, sadness, smile, smiling
14,332 people liked it

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: be-yourself, confidence, individuality, those-who-matter
17,733 people liked it

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

tags: action, change, inspirational, philosophy, wish
11,254 people liked it

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

tags: life
10,943 people liked it

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

tags: books, soul
10,869 people liked it

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

tags: confidence, inspirational, wisdom
10,181 people liked it

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: dreams, love, reality, sleep
10,092 people liked it

"Your problem isn't the problem, it's your attitude about the problem."
— The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, By Ann Brashares

51 people liked it

"She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were. "
— Ann Brashares

14 people liked it

"There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't."
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

49 people liked it

"some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once."
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

tags: love
32 people liked it

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

tags: life
181 people liked it

"She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

5 people liked it

"All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

tags: love
14 people liked it