isla > isla's Quotes

“There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be.”
― Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society

“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.”
― Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society

“I'd rather take coffee than compliments just now.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Some things are better dealt within the cleansing light of transparency and openness rather than in the darkness of secrecy.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“I worry that all this secrecy, all this unwillingness to change, to evolve—to listen to reason—is eroding all that we stand for. Endangering everything that we have vowed to protect and defend.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

“Even though my brain was a mess, what kept my soul whole was the warmth of the hands holding mine on both sides”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond