Ash > Ash's Quotes

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.”
― Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset...Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses...When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
― E.E. Cummings

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Feminism is a choice, and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, that is her right, but it is still my responsibility to fight for her rights. I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves. I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Doesn't it seem that it is always by chance that these things happen, or is it because of the generosity of a shared knowledge of suffering that allows for it?”
― David Gianadda, Everything You Say Is Goodbye

“The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.”
― David Gianadda, Everything You Say Is Goodbye

“We too had branched off from the people who had come before us, a family that made the family that made us, and we were shining in the darkness and casting our light all around us.”
― David Gianadda, Everything You Say Is Goodbye

“I’d been hoping to find an inscription or a letter concealed inside, but the Bible’s empty of wisdom.”
― Stuart Turton, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“Some kids in West Texas don’t feel rain on their face until they’re five.”
― Julia Heaberlin, We Are All the Same in the Dark

“The avengers outside are the worst kind, the ones in silver cross necklaces, baseball caps, and Life is Good T-shirts. The ones who stay up until midnight to build their first-graders’ Alamo projects out of sugar cubes, cancel a Thanksgiving cruise to bring Grandma some turkey in the hospital, spend a full paycheck on ACL surgery for the family dog. Their love for God and family is just as manic as their hate.”
― Julia Heaberlin, We Are All the Same in the Dark

“The moisture is predatory in this part of the world, and no element, be it stone or wood or tin or steel, lasts very long without losing some part of its composition to the nag of precipitation.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio