Enola > Enola's Quotes

“The things about Shakespeare is, he's so eloquent...he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike -- in the second place, folks don't like to have someone around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates them. Your not gonna change any of them by talkin' right, they've got to want to learn themselves, and when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Secrets carry weight, like lead.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I don't know, it's like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets makes sense. The good ones, anyway.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe- some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others- some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men.
But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There is no comfort like complicity.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984