Beth > Beth's Quotes

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“Things may happen and often do to people as brainy and footsy as you”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“I love my job. I love the pay!
~I love it more and more each day.
~I love my boss, he is the best!
~I love his boss and all the rest.

~I love my office and its location. I hate to have to go on vacation.
~I love my furniture, drab and grey, and piles of paper that grow each day!
~I think my job is swell, there's nothing else I love so well.
~I love to work among my peers, I love their leers, and jeers, and sneers.
~I love my computer and its software; I hug it often though it won't care.
~I love each program and every file, I'd love them more if they worked a while.

~I'm happy to be here. I am. I am.
~I'm the happiest slave of the Firm, I am.
~I love this work. I love these chores.
~I love the meetings with deadly bores.
~I love my job - I'll say it again - I even love those friendly men.
~Those friendly men who've come today, in clean white coats to take me away!!!!!”
― Dr. Suess

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
― Charles Chaplin

“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
― Walker Evans

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.”
― Bill Nye

“My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.”
― Ashleigh Brilliant

“One eye sees, the other feels.”
― Paul Klee

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
― Mary Oliver