Anna > Anna's Quotes

“I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“I believe we are all transient," she began. She thought for awhile and added, "I believe that we are half-blind and full of errors. I believe that we understand very little, and what we do understand is mostly wrong. I believe that life cannot be survived - that is evident! - but if one is lucky, life can be endured for quite a long while. If one is both lucky and stubborn, life can sometimes even be enjoyed.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“That was the strange thing - I didn't hate my father. He had wanted something. Like I wanted Suzanne. Or my mother wanted Frank. You wanted things and you couldn't help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean's surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms..."what language did the mermaid speak?" Alma wanted to know, imagining that it like almost have to be Greek. "English!" Henry said. "By God, plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Be wakeful and watchful, she heard Henry say. Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“She was not afraid of death, in theory. If anything, she had nothing but respect and reverence for the Genius of Death, who had shaped this world more than any other force. That said, she did not wish to die quite this moment. She still wanted to see what would happen next, as much as ever. The thing was to resist submersion for as long as possible.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“But Catherine did not know her own advantages - did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life... My precept is, "Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something".”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“You honestly expect me to believe that people go on vacations without making a spreadsheet of fun first?”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People