Lisa > Lisa's Quotes

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
― Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice

“It's no good choosing your first husband from a school for evil geniuses. Much too difficult to kill.”
― Gail Carriger, Etiquette & Espionage

“We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.”
― Lloyd Alexander

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

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Albert Einstein

“It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.”
― Ian McEwan

“Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.”
― Dan Brown, Digital Fortress

“I am large, I contain multitudes”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.”
― Vikram Chandra

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life”
― Diane di Prima

“I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ”
― Boris Pasternak

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“It's actually very difficult to make something both simple and good.”
― Paul Simon

“Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?”
― Christopher Paolini

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

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

“Where did feelings go when they disappeared? Did they leave a chemical trace somewhere in our minds, so that if we could look inside ourselves we would see via the patterns of neurons some of the important things that had happened to us in our lifetimes?”
― Evelyn Lau, Inside Out: Reflections on a life so far

“She had spent years locked in a tower, unable to see anything of the world but the scarp of forest beyond her window, but stories had provided her escape. New books, old books, dramas and histories and fantastical adventures, stories of ordinary lives, stories of dragons and demons, murders and mysteries and myths from long ago. A hundred possible worlds, more true to her than her own, more compelling than a life of staring at the same walls and same trees, waiting for the day when the lock would click and she would finally be allowed to be free. A story could not hurt her.”
― Rhiannon Thomas, A Wicked Thing

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― Isabel Allende

“Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that’s why so many adults read YA: we’re never done coming of age.”
― Betsy Cornwell

“How, he wondered, did humanity ever get along without duct tape?”
― Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char