Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“...what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Fate would not have the reputation it has, if it simply did what it seemed it would do.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“If patience wasn’t so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue. . . ”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life," he began, "that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.”
― Abraham Lincoln, Quotations of Abraham Lincoln

“The loneliest sound in the world is other people making love.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“The I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools speak because they have to say something”
― Plato

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“To all light things
I compared her: to
a snowflake, a feather”
― R.S. Thomas

“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler