Heather > Heather's Quotes

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it.”
― Woody Allen

“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”
― Woody Allen, Without Feathers

“Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Those who don't try never look foolish.”
― Stephen Schwartz, Wicked: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

“Some things I cannot change, but 'til I try I'll never know.”
― Stephen Schwartz, Wicked: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

“An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.”
― Brandon Mull

“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
― Wilfred Arlan Peterson

“If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”
― Edward Abbey

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) separate

“We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure