Caroline Woods > Caroline's Quotes

“But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love…. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“If I’m ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, “What would a ferret do?” or, “How would a salamander respond to this situation?” Invariably, I find the right answer.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“A heron flew over the bamboo forest—and Siddhartha took the heron into his soul, he flew over the forest and the mountains, was a heron, gobbled fish, hungered as a heron hungers, spoke heron croak, died the death of a heron. A dead jackal lay on the sandy shore, and Siddhartha's soul slipped inside its corpse, became a dead jackal, lay on the strand, swelled up, stank, putrefied, was dismembered by hyenas, skinned by vultures, became bones, dust, blew in open country. And Siddhartha's soul returned, died, decayed, turned to dust, tasted the muddy rush of the cycle, waiting in new thirst like a hunter for the gap where the cycle could be escaped, where the end of causes, where eternity free of suffering would begin. He mortified his senses, he slew his memory, he slid out of his I into a thousand alien shapes, became beast, carrion, stone, wood, water, and found himself every time awakening again, in the light of the sun or the moon, again he was I, whirling around in the round, he felt thirst, conquered thirst, felt thirst anew.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Everything that can be thought with thoughts and said with words is unilateral, everything one-sided, a moiety, everything lacks wholeness, roundness, unity…. But the world itself, that which exists around us and inside us, is never unilateral.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The world, Govinda, my friend, is not imperfect, not to be seen as on a slow path towards perfection: No, it is perfect in every moment, all transgression already bears grace within itself, all little children already have the aged in themselves, all sucklings death, all the dying eternal life.... For that reason to me it seems what is appears good, death as life, transgression as holiness, cleverness as foolishness; everything must be so, requiring only my acceptance, only my willingness, my loving accord, for it to be good for me, to work for my benefit, never able to harm me.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We meet fear. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos