Sarah Chretien > Sarah's Quotes

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
― Oscar Wilde, Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“She said, 'I'm so afraid.' And I said, 'why?,' and she said, 'Because I'm so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.' I asked her why and she said, 'They only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I will follow you to the ends of the world.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“- Why me?
- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
- Yes.
- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five