Dolores's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 151)

"my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the Western stars until I die"
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

10 people liked it

"I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move"
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tennyson's Poetry)

tags: self
13 people liked it

"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay)

tags: fig, first
63 people liked it

"Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. (in a letter written while she was in college)"
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

14 people liked it

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: men, women
818 people liked it

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."
— Anaïs Nin

101 people liked it

"ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions."
— D.H. Lawrence

3 people liked it

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

tags: novel, politics
64 people liked it

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
— James Joyce

tags: lyrical, silence
19 people liked it

"I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the non-plused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand."
— Joan Didion

13 people liked it

"He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible."
— Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero)

tags: life, metaphor
4 people liked it

"Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.'"
— Sarah Vowell (Take the Cannoli)

4 people liked it

"The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar."
— Groucho Marx

60 people liked it

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colin." Need I say more?"
— Chris Rock

tags: comedy, everyday, funny, humor, life, observational
504 people liked it

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
— John Lennon

tags: beatles, fate, life, planning, plans
6,707 people liked it

"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?"
— John Lennon

tags: beatles, dragons, dreamers, dreaming, dreams, fairies, faith, mythology, nightmares, reality, truth
393 people liked it

"My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."
— Malcolm X

tags: books, reading
325 people liked it

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it."
— Malcolm X (By Any Means Necessary)

tags: philosophy, politics
426 people liked it

"You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music."
— Annie Proulx

17 people liked it

"... there are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman."
— Annie Proulx

9 people liked it

"He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged. "
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

tags: life
4 people liked it

"It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

18 people liked it

"I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.

"
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

12 people liked it

"Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise."
— Jane Austen (Emma)

55 people liked it

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language"
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: books, novels, reading
215 people liked it

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."
— James Baldwin

tags: love
501 people liked it

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
— James Baldwin

tags: books, empathy, pain, reading
535 people liked it

"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. "
— James Baldwin

32 people liked it

"People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life."
— James Baldwin (Giovanni's Room)

14 people liked it

"Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult."
— Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire)

tags: evil, good
162 people liked it

"“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”"
— Arthur Rimbaud

19 people liked it

"Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

tags: life
106 people liked it

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs"
— Charlotte Brontë

tags: eyre, jane
107 people liked it

"Conventionality is not morality."
— Charlotte Brontë

tags: morality
55 people liked it

"No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot."
— Charles Dickens

tags: friend, mutual, our
78 people liked it

"There is a wisdom of the head, and... a wisdom of the heart."
— Charles Dickens

38 people liked it

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

tags: individuality, majority, minority, pause, reflect, wisdom
6,051 people liked it

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
— Mark Twain

tags: truth
2,176 people liked it

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, friends, friendship, life
3,848 people liked it

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, health, humor, misprints
2,327 people liked it

"Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket."
— Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)

47 people liked it

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"
— Victor Hugo

tags: literature, music, poetry
583 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
7,377 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
2,607 people liked it

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

tags: imagination, life, money
1,207 people liked it

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

tags: life
4,175 people liked it

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books"
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

tags: books, learning, love, serenity
559 people liked it

"For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

tags: acceptance, contentment, raining
65 people liked it

"What you have lost will not be returned to you; it always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on, or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you."
— Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)

18 people liked it

"Soul meets soul on lovers lips."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

15 people liked it

« previous 1 2 3 4 next »

Dolores's profile »

all quotes
add a quote

Dolores's quotes

tags from Dolores's quotes