Isabetta > Isabetta's Quotes

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
― Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

“Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
― Edith Wharton

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion

“Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.”
― Dan Brown, Digital Fortress

“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.”
― Leonard Cohen

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Intention, good or bad, is not enough.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I do love her, and that’s odd because she is everything I detest in anyone else.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Touch has a memory.”
― John Keats

“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
― John Keats

“I want a brighter word than bright”
― John Keats

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch