M's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 469)

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

tags: life, love
253 people liked it

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

tags: life
142 people liked it

"I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

138 people liked it

"One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

tags: family
107 people liked it

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

123 people liked it

"When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

108 people liked it

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

89 people liked it

"We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

73 people liked it

"... I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

tags: personal
80 people liked it

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

40 people liked it

"I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?""
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

47 people liked it

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

tags: close, extremely, foer, incredibly, jonathan, living, loud, safran
102 people liked it

"Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

46 people liked it

"She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

29 people liked it

"I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others -- The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

46 people liked it

"Songs are as sad as the listener."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

42 people liked it

""The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer." "
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

29 people liked it

"I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

14 people liked it

"Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment."
— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

8 people liked it

"But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better."
— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

16 people liked it

"Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself - it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only witnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees.

(Gareth van Meer)"
— Marisha Pessl

4 people liked it

"People always clap for the wrong reasons."
— Holden Caulfield ( The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger)

58 people liked it

"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to. -Holden Caulfield"
— J.D. Salinger

tags: catcher, rye, salinger
21 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,328 people liked it

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: enemies, forgiveness, strategy
5,914 people liked it

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: life
4,146 people liked it

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,596 people liked it

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: imagination, life, money
1,202 people liked it

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: identity, opinions
1,038 people liked it

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

tags: books, morality, reading, writing
731 people liked it

"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: age
906 people liked it

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: creation, god, humor, man
766 people liked it

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: breakfast, brilliant, insults
452 people liked it

"I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

tags: books, humor
506 people liked it

"A good friend will always stab you in the front."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: betrayal, friends
646 people liked it

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

tags: experience, mistakes, wisdom
518 people liked it

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: education, knowledge
430 people liked it

"No good deed goes unpunished."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: humor
329 people liked it

"Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: humor, work
215 people liked it

"Veel van wat aanvankelijk alleen in de verbeelding bestaat, wordt werkelijkheid."
— Arthur Japin (Een Schitterend Gebrek)

tags: philosophy
2 people liked it

"Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

66 people liked it

"Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

tags: i, part
108 people liked it

"Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

18 people liked it

"People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

28 people liked it

"We are willing to believe anything other than the truth."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

tags: belief, truth
11 people liked it

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

72 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

"She lay in the dark and knew everything."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

13 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

"Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

7 people liked it

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