Esther > Esther's Quotes

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You have my whole heart. You always did.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.”
― Charles Bowen

“Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I've felt basically lucky ever since, almost every day of my life. That's something else love should make you feel. It should make you fell fortunate.
It will be made clear to you in a stray gesture, the line of a throat. Something in the hands. There may or may not be any music playing. But there will be a certain velocity of the spirit, a sensation of dropping through clear space unimpeded, and you think, This is the one. I found you.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, The Zygote Chronicles

“I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.”
― DH Lawrence, Women in Love

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventure of the Creeping Man

“The game is afoot.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventure of the Abbey Grange - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

“I'm not a psychopath, I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.”
― Steven Moffat, A Study In Pink

“Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.... And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1

“Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?"
"For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine bottle.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

“We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.”
― Leonard Cohen

“So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Lay Morals

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers

“The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?”
― Bob Marley

“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you
don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not
doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or
less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have
problems with our friends or family, we blame the other
person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will
grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive
effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason
and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no
reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you
understand, and you show that you understand, you can
love, and the situation will change”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.

From time to time, sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, 'Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly. I don't want to make you suffer, and if I do so because of my ignorance, please tell me so that I can love you better, so that you can be happy." If you say this in a voice that communicates your real openness to understand, the other person may cry.

That is a good sign, because it means the door of understanding is opening and everything will be possible again.

Maybe a father does not have time or is not brave enough to ask his son such a question. Then the love between them will not be as full as it could be. We need courage to ask these questions, but if we don't ask, the more we love, the more we may destroy the people we are trying to love. True love needs understanding. With understanding, the one we love will certainly flower.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life