Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.”
― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay

“It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”
― Charles Dickens

“Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to
pull the heart out of them? Why don't you have a bit more restraint, or
reserve, or something?"

She looked up at him full of pain, then continued slowly to stroke her
lips against a ruffled flower. Their scent, as she smelled it, was so
much kinder than he; it almost made her cry.”
― D. H. Lawrence

“She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall to
pieces, and go in immense, rose-coloured ruin towards the darkness. Gold
flamed to scarlet, like pain in its intense brightness. Then the scarlet
sank to rose, and rose to crimson, and quickly the passion went out of
the sky. All the world was dark grey. Paul scrambled quickly down with
his basket, tearing his shirt-sleeve as he did so.”
― D. H. Lawrence

“Sometimes it seems that the leaders of nations are little boys with chips on their shoulders, daring each other to knock them off.”
― John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal

“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“Wait for Me

Wait for me, and I'll return
Only wait very hard
Wait when you are filled with sorrow...
Wait in the sweltering heat
Wait when the others have stopped waiting,
Forgetting their yesterdays.

Wait even when from afar no letters come to you
Wait even when others are tired of waiting...
And when friends sit around the fire,
Drinking to my memory,
Wait, and do not hurry to drink to my memory too.

Wait. For I'll return,defying every death.
And let those who do not wait say that I was lucky.
They will never understand that in the midst of death,
You with you waiting saved me.
Only you and I know how I survived.
It's because you waited, as no one else did.”
― Konstantin Simonov

“…but Sassenach—I am the true home of your heart, and I know that.”

He lifted my hands to his mouth and kissed my upturned palms, one and then the other, his breath warm and his beard-stubble soft on my fingers.

“I have loved others, and I do love many, Sassenach—but you alone hold all my heart, whole in your hands,” he said softly. “And you know that.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood

“Ain't you thinkin' what's it gonna be like when we get there? Ain't you scared it won't be nice like we thought?

No, she said quickly. No, I ain't. You can't do that. I can't do that. It's too much - livin' too many lives. Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes, it'll on'y be one.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“They were going to look at war, the red
animal--war, the blood-swollen god.”
― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

“Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.”
― Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“Don't be afraid. There's the two of us now.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.”
― Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

“But the sky...cumulonimbus clouds are stacked and banked to the stratosphere, and the lowering sun has bronzed and brassed and blushed them. these are clouds to make you long for wings. These are clouds that leave you not knowing what to believe. - - - Population 485 - Meeting your Neighbors One Siren at a Time”
― Michael Perry

“What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one's life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.”
― Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts

“Lower [plane] than one of those who perished. It was their war, not mine. I was able to walk out of it, leave it behind. Though God preserved me, the best stories were theirs, and these were cut short. The real story of a war is no story at all - blackness, sadness, silence. The stories they tell of comradeship and valor are all to make up for what they lacked. When I was in the army I was always surrounded by thousands of men, and yet I was almost always alone. Whenever I made friends, they were killed.
"If I describe what I saw of war, you'll know it from the point of view of the living, and that is the smallest part of the truth. The truth itself is what was finally apprehended by those who didn't come back.”
― Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War

“Actually, said Molly, it’s no harder for girls to pee than boys, the problem isn’t biology, it’s men’s fear of women’s bodies. If we were allowed to pull our knickers down and squat by a wall the way you’re allowed to get your dick out and piss up the wall there wouldn’t be a problem, it’s just the way you all act as if a vagina will come and eat you if it’s out without a muzzle.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“And I reckon this is jut my lice, too," the other said. 'But I know now why it is,' Byron things. 'It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August