Ingrid > Ingrid's Quotes

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

“I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book thief without the words.

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones.”
― Pablo Neruda, Still Another Day

“People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek..."Don't do that", I said. "You just met me. This is New York.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.”
― Charles Dickens

“You have been so careful of me that I never had a child's heart.
You have trained me so well that I never dreamed a child's dream. You have dealt so wisely with me, Father ,from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child's belief or a child's fear.
Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to it. " My dear Louisa," said he, you abundantly repay my care. Kiss me, my dear girl.”
― charles Dickens, Hard Times

“Beauty is about being comfortable in your own skin. It's about knowing and accepting who you are.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding

“Laugh. Laugh as much as you can. Laugh until you cry. Cry until you laugh. Keep doing it even if people are passing you on the street saying, "I can't tell if that person is laughing or crying, but either way they seem crazy, let's walk faster." Emote. It's okay. It shows you are thinking and feeling.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding

“I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“My motivation, even in anticipated shame, lay always in others. You can take the woman out of the upstairs, but you can't take the upstairs out of her.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“it took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you've found the pot of gold, when you'd thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It's enough, for a time - maybe even for a long time - to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized-a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle-then this only makes the pictures the more mine.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“When you are the woman upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you “best of all.” It’s a small thing, you might think, and maybe it depends on your temperament, maybe for some people it’s a small thing, but for me […]”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men