Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“But you can't stop knowing something, can you?”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.”
― Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

“The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will
do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and
talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.”
― Tobias Wolff, The Night in Question

“You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.”
― Truman Capote

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
― Alice Walker

“Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“You can't lie to your soul.”
― Irvine Welsh, Porno

“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”
― Gustave Flaubert