Zainab's quotes

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"I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem."
— Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber)

tags: claire, fiction, fraser, historical, romance, scotland, time, travel
313 people liked it

"My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathed enemy."
— William Shakespeare

tags: romance, romeo-and-juliet
237 people liked it

"It's only words and words are all I have to take your heart away"
— Barry Gibb

tags: authors, inspirational, music, romance, songwriters, writing
223 people liked it

"thus with a kiss I die"
— William Shakespeare

tags: history, romance
164 people liked it

"Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan."
— David Sedaris (Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)

tags: fighting, relationships, romance, sex
48 people liked it

"Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs."
— Margaret Atwood

tags: romance
66 people liked it

"You always get weirdos like Edward who seem to attract women for some reason. If Edward wasn’t a fictional character and you met him in reality he is like one of those guys who would probably be an axe murderer or something."
— Stephenie Meyer (The Twilight Saga)

tags: twilight
5,704 people liked it

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

tags: love
2,657 people liked it

"'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam)

tags: love
2,320 people liked it

"We love the things we love for what they are."
— Robert Frost

tags: love, poetry
1,111 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
566 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
589 people liked it

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

tags: books, humor, reading, television
2,953 people liked it

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,381 people liked it

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

tags: books, journey, reading, travel
682 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
556 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
639 people liked it

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

tags: reading, writing
581 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

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert

tags: books, reading
422 people liked it

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898"
— Mark Twain

tags: austen, criticism, jerk, reading, writing
262 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
349 people liked it

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. (from the introduction)"
— Stephen King (Skeleton Crew)

tags: reading, writing
173 people liked it

"When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”"
— Virginia Woolf

tags: bookworms, heavenly, judgment, reading, rewards
146 people liked it

"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."
— Philip Pullman

tags: reading, writing
90 people liked it

"Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day."
— Kurt Vonnegut

tags: philosophy, reading
77 people liked it

"Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not."
— Francis Bacon

tags: reading
55 people liked it

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."
— John Berger (Keeping a Rendezvous)

tags: books, reading, stories, story
60 people liked it

"When you read a book as a child,it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your life does..."
— Nora Ephron

tags: reading
56 people liked it

"…only then did I wake out of the book."
— John McGahern

tags: books, reading
36 people liked it

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

tags: humor, mankind, people
3,331 people liked it

"Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

tags: funny, humour
1,000 people liked it

"If a book about failures doesn't sell, is it a success?"
— Jerry Seinfeld

tags: books, funny
561 people liked it

"A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B."
— Fats Domino

tags: funny
627 people liked it

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. In the library the sign says 'shut the fuck up!'"
— Rodney Dangerfield

tags: fuck, funny, humour, libraries, neighborhoods, profanity
432 people liked it

"Once I pulled a job, I was so stupid. I picked a guy's pocket on an airplane and made a run for it."
— Rodney Dangerfield

tags: crime, funny, humour
263 people liked it

"A funny thing is if you're out hiking and your friend gets bit by a poisonous snake, tell him you're going for help, then go about ten feet and pretend YOU got bit by a snake. Then start an argument about who's going to get help. A lot of guys will start crying. That's why it makes you feel good when you tell them it was just a joke."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

tags: funny, humour
216 people liked it

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
— Herbert Hoover

tags: age, death, fighting, old, war, youth
207 people liked it

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

tags: love, war
110 people liked it

"Looked into the sky, heavy with smoke and human fat, and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. It is not God that kills the children, not fate the butchers them, nor destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

tags: atheism, war
85 people liked it

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

tags: books, fiction, literature
355 people liked it

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
— Jessamyn West

tags: books, fiction, reality, truth
223 people liked it

"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory; you must remember this."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

tags: apocalyptic, contemporary, fiction, mythology
46 people liked it

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
— Robert Frost

tags: poetry
281 people liked it

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

tags: friends, friendship
9,832 people liked it

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
— Elbert Hubbard

tags: friend, friendship, knowledge, love
6,762 people liked it

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

tags: books, friends, friendship, life
4,027 people liked it

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'"
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

tags: friendship
3,190 people liked it

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: friendship, love
1,660 people liked it

"You're the one who is weak. You will never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry for you."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

tags: friendship, love, weakness
1,554 people liked it

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