Lucynell > Lucynell 's Quotes

“Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around and hinder traffic?”
― H.H. Munro, The Complete Saki

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”
― William Faulkner

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.”
― Ayn Rand

“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. ”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.”
― Alice B. Toklas

“I guess there are never enough books.”
― John Steinbeck, A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia

“Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“The world's perverse, but it could be worse.”
― Mona Van Duyn

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.”
― Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

“Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”
― Charles Eames

“Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”
― O. Henry

“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?”
― Carson McCullers, A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

“I'm sure partial to the evening,' Augustus said. 'The evening and the morning. If we just didn't have to have the rest of the dern day I'd be a lot happier.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The world is like that -- incomprehensible and full of surprises .”
― Jorge Amado, Gabriela, clavo y canela

“I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge