Elena > Elena's Quotes

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

“Well, don't expect us to be too impressed. We just saw Finnick Odair in his underwear.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
― Edward Gorey

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.”
― Mary Anne Radmacher

“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

“If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”
― Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President

“It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria e Outros Poemas

“I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: What do believe in? What do you hope for? What do you love?”
― Paullina Simons, The Bronze Horseman

“When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.”
― Paullina Simons, The Bronze Horseman

“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
― Edward Gorey

“What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.”
― Edward Gorey, Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

“I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.”
― Edward Gorey

“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”
― Edward Gorey

“I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.”
― Edward Gorey

“My favorite journey is looking out the window.”
― Edward Gorey

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We both have war inside us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us.”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent

“There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.”
― Albert Dietrich, Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich