Andrea Smith > Andrea's Quotes

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

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

“I know of a cure for everything: salt water...in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Karen Blixen

“There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

“It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

“The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed; so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing of guilt or desert; either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concerns of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats - time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry.”
― karen blixen, Out of Africa

“If I know a song of Africa,—I thought,—of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me? I”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa: and Shadows on the Grass

“And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“I'm not interested in light little flings, skin-deep attractions, or long loveless marriages. With you, I only want raw, full-blooded connection, to share a bond full of passion and breathtaking adventure. After all, love is not a pastime but a privilege.”
― Beau Taplin

“True friends are always together in spirit.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Do you think amethysts can be the souls of good violets?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Do you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer, and this is their heaven.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“I love a book that makes me cry.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer...She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true...She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture...All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
― Victor Hugo

“Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind. ”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.”
― Victor Hugo