Jane > Jane's Quotes

“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”
― Harry Crews

“Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.”
― Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

“Understanding comes with life. As a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people - sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having sympathy for people. ”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
― John Green

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.”
― Josh Billings

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
― Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“We worked well together because I was quiet, fascinated by her stories of Wisconsin, which, as she told it, was not only the center of the universe but the place where all life began.”
― Susan Power, The Grass Dancer

“I was vaguely attracted to both library science and accounting, for the way that these disciplines impose order on chaos.”
― Kathleen Norris

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Encountering gender apartheid and waged slavery shook me to my roots more than half a century ago in Afghanistan. Oh, the women of Afghanistan, the women of the Muslim world. I was no feminist -- but now, thinking back, I see how much I learned there, how clearly their condition taught me to see gender discrimination anywhere and, above all, taught me to see how cruel oppressed women could be to each other. They taught me about women everywhere.”
― Phyllis Chesler, An American Bride in Kabul

“[Prayer] will not protect you. It will help your soul. It's for while you're alive.”
― Phil Klay, Redeployment

“Since Lenin died, every Soviet leader had been a liar. They had all glossed over what was wrong and declined to acknowledge reality. The most striking characteristic of Soviet leadership for the last sixty-five year was the refusal to face facts.(1075)”
― Ken Follett, Edge of Eternity

“Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories and Poems

“Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair and let us huddle together as darkness takes over. We are at home amidst the birds and the trees, for we are children of nature.”
― Susan Polis Schutz

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!”
― C. J. Cherryh

“I always knew what was most important to me. When I was growing up, nothing was more important than golf, but that’s the attitude of a young person who hasn’t a care in the world. Later on I figured it out. Family was first. Always. Then golf and business come after.”
― Arnold Palmer, A Life Well Played: My Stories

“What we remember is probably fiction anyway.”
― Beryl Bainbridge

“My mood settles around me, a wool coat that seems to grow heavier with the months in which I accomplish very little--and then, since the coat is too heavy to allow movement, accomplish nothing at all.”
― Mark Doty, Dog Years