Fran > Fran's Quotes

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
― John Green

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
― Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”
― George Santayana , The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

“I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all i knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions

“Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!”
― Ogden Nash, Collected Verse from 1929 On

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.”
― Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!”
― Wilkie Collins, Armadale

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“It is better, I think, to grab at the stars than to sit flustered because you know you cannot reach them.”
― R.A. Salvatore, Sojourn

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.”
― August Strindberg, Miss Julie