E.J. > E.J.'s Quotes

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“The trouble with wars is that they all look alike to people who aren’t involved. Only the skin color of the dead is different.”
― Jonathan Carroll, From the Teeth of Angels

“The things you used to own, now they own you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“At the end of things, The Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.” And the lost will say, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The days are stacked against what we think we are.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
― Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
― Horace Walpole

“Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Dustfinger still clearly remembered the feeling of being in love for the first time. How vulnerable his heart had suddenly been! Such a trembling, quivering thing, happy and miserably unhappy at once.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

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

“I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Everything you want in life has teeth.”
― Jonathan Carroll, From the Teeth of Angels

“Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others.”
― Baltasar Gracian

“I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.”
― Denis Waitley

“A person hears only what they understand.”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.”
― Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War