Nusrah Javed > Nusrah's Quotes

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Sir,"she said,"you are no gentleman!"

An apt observation,"he answered airily."And, you, Miss, are no lady.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

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

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
― Neil Gaiman

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole."

[Blog post of July 26, 2011]”
― Jim C. Hines

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“This is a work of fiction.
If certain characters resemble people in real life, it is because certain people in real life resemble characters from a novel.
Nobody, therefore, is entitled to feel included in this book.
Nobody, by the same token, to feel excluded.”
― Fernando Del Paso, Palinuro de México

“We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“What feminism means for me is simply that women, like men, are complete human beings with limitless possibilities.”
― Fahmida Riaz

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
― Henry Thomas Buckle

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I was told love should be unconditional. That's the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“How do you know you're not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: 'I like strong women.' If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because 'I like strong women' is code for: 'I hate strong women.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“To be born in that city—I went so far as to write once, thinking not of myself but of Lila’s pessimism—is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then—I think today—did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child