Sarah's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 449)

"It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets."
— James McBride (The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition)

tags: culture, heat, south
6 people liked it

"That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness..."
— Anne Rivers Siddons (Colony)

tags: southern
3 people liked it

"I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

tags: love
123 people liked it

"For all eternity, I forgive you and you forgive me."
— William Blake

tags: forgivness, love
43 people liked it

"A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages."
— Tennessee Williams

32 people liked it

"Altruism is for those
who can't endure their desires.
There's a world

as ambiguous as a moan,
a pleasure moan
our earnest neighbors

might think a crime.
It's where we could live.
I'll say I love you,

Which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid

poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone else has.

--Mon Semblable"
— Stephen Dunn (Different Hours: Poems)

tags: disappointment, love, pleasure
6 people liked it

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism
4,865 people liked it

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: strength
5,157 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, misfits, nonconformity, quo, rebels, status, think
6,740 people liked it

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead

tags: activism, change, inspirational, life, philosophy, world
2,064 people liked it

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, ethics, justice, philosophy
946 people liked it

"The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."
— W.H. Auden (Selected Poems)

tags: poetry
65 people liked it

"I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after."
— Wallace Stevens

tags: poetry
25 people liked it

"Te amo como se aman ciertas cosa oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.
(I love you as certain darks things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)"
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

tags: love, poetry
369 people liked it

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain."
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)

tags: april, cruelty, poetry, seasons, weather
45 people liked it

"'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer."
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land and Other Writings)

tags: poetry
15 people liked it

"I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?"
— Walker Percy

6 people liked it

"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

tags: books, reading
197 people liked it

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
— Gabriel García Márquez

tags: first-sentence
90 people liked it

"I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?"
— Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment)

tags: love, politics, war
24 people liked it

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

tags: books, soul
10,832 people liked it

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
6,972 people liked it

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

tags: action, actions, disappointed, disappointment, discover, dream, dreams, explore, sail
7,447 people liked it

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

4,702 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
10,242 people liked it

"Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."
— T.S. Eliot

tags: poetry
34 people liked it

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world,
which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

From Dover Beach"
— Matthew Arnold (Dover Beach and Other Poems)

tags: love, poetry
27 people liked it

"nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

-excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems"
— e.e. cummings

tags: poetry
69 people liked it

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Complete Poems)

tags: poetry
14 people liked it

"Summer night-
even the stars
are whipering to each other.
"
— Issa

tags: haiku, poetry
19 people liked it

"Of the many forms that silence takes, the most memorable is the dry husk of the cicada."
— Jon Davis

tags: poetry, prose
5 people liked it

"I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day."
— Pablo Neruda

tags: poetry
20 people liked it

"and if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

(from i must become a menace to my enemies)"
— June Jordan (Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan)

tags: poetry
4 people liked it

"Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds."
— Ezra Pound

tags: art, poetry, pound
18 people liked it

"And Sometimes I Sit

and sometimes I sit
down at my typewriter
and I think
not of someone
cause there isn't anyone
to think
about and i wonder
is it worth it"
— Nikki Giovanni

tags: love, poetry, writing
15 people liked it

"Επιθυμίες
Σαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασαν
και τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό,
με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά --
έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασαν
χωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιά
της ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό."

Desires
"Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; without any of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness."
— Constantine P. Cavafy (Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy)

tags: greece, greek, modern, poetry
5 people liked it

"Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road-- Only wakes upon the sea.

Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar."
— Antonio Machado (Campos de Castilla)

tags: inspirational, poetry, spanish
22 people liked it

"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent! "
— George Gordon Byron

tags: poetry
20 people liked it

"This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me"
— Walt Whitman

tags: poetry
5 people liked it

"And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor -
And this, and so much more? -"
— T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems)

tags: poetry, prufrock
14 people liked it

"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades."
— Boris Pasternak

tags: beauty, poetry
3 people liked it

"But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones."
— Jeffrey McDaniel

tags: poetry
9 people liked it

"I give you this to take with you:
Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can
begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting."
— Judith Minty (Letters to My Daughters)

tags: change, leaving, moving, poetry, rebirth, time
7 people liked it

""Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.""
— Louise Glück (The Seven Ages)

tags: poetry
5 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
112 people liked it

"Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?"
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

tags: first-sentence, literature
19 people liked it

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

tags: first-sentence
15 people liked it

"The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road."
— Alex Garland (The Beach)

tags: first-sentence
6 people liked it

"All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths."
— Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss)

tags: first-sentence
3 people liked it