Susannah > Susannah's Quotes

“The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.”
― Epictetus

“We are only the trustees for those who come after us.”
― William Morris, William Morris by Himself: Designs and Writings

“Love doesn't die; the men and women do.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession

“I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.”
― Clara Barton, The Story of My Childhood

“To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking”
― Agnes De Mille

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“This is how women self-sabotage and self-destruct. Unless we have constant witnesses to our hard work, we are convinced we pull off every day of our lives through smoke and mirrors. (27)”
― Sarah Breathnach, Peace and Plenty: Finding Your Path to Financial Serenity

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams

“I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green

I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know

But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

“And she understood, all by herself, without reading it in a novel or hearing it on a radio program, that falling passionately in love with someone, without reservation or holding back, was good for the heart. For its valves and its arteries and that invisible shadow of the heart called the soul. Falling in love was good for the soul.”
― Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather

“The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not know when to quit fighting.”
― Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women

“Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.”
― Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

“Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.”
― Kij Johnson

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi

“When a baronet is discovered behind a bush in the park with a guardsman, or a minister of the crown is caught creeping out of a country with his socks stuffed full of bank notes and a woman not his wife ten paces behind, or a public person is revealed disporting himself with a couple of tarts and a teddy bear in West Paddington, they complain to the press that the outcry is hypocritical and that everyone would like to do what they were doing if only they had the chance. They regard the law as an instrument of envy, like nationalization and death duties.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Sin Eater

“Most of the women correspondents couldn't make a marriage last. We'd tasted too much of life on our own terms and you didn't find men who could manage with that.”
― Phyllis Edgerly Ring, The Munich Girl

“She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister

“Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their hearts and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why—fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The “end of days” fantasy was even more infuriating.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Where you tend a rose my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”
― Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Juvenile Fiction, Classics, Family

“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world," he said wisely one day, "but people don't know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden