Jan > Jan's Quotes

“My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Heartless harvest of mine, I'm tired of pissin benediction.
Maybe it ain't healthy, but sometimes I'd rather burn then let you help me.”
― Aesop Rock

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

“Hearts are made to be broken.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
― Robert Frost

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
― Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.”
― Murakami, Haruki

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple? ”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.

A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.

A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.”
― J. Patrick Lewis

“I won't be sad too often,
If they bury me in the library
With bookworms in my coffin.”
― J. Patrick Lewis

“Please bury me in the library
With a dozen long-stemmed proses”
― J. Patrick Lewis, Please Bury Me in the Library