Nicki > Nicki's Quotes

“Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.”
― Pat Conroy

“American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.”
― Théophile Gautier

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“She asked where he lived.

Second to the right,' said Peter, 'and then straight on till morning.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

“Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
― Chris Abani

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. ”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

“I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together?
Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.”
― Emery Allen

“There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“The moment hung in time like a drop of honey from a spoon, heavy, golden.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“You’ve made me shiny, Laura,” I said. I tried to stop it, but a little tear ran down the side of my nose. I wiped it away with the back of my hand before it could dampen the ends of my new hair. “Thank you for making me shiny.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”
― Andrew Carnegie

“One can never had too many librarian friends.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, The Wedding Quilt

“Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and plains. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir