Jaclyn > Jaclyn's Quotes

“I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.”
― George Gissing

“I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Do no harm and leave the world a better place than you found it.”
― Patricia Cornwell

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”
― Erin McKean

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“You can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones. Ultimately, the real question is whether you want to be happy.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.")”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,but I don't believe that." he said.

Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh,the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else will.”
― Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“No good thing renders its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of loss.”
― Seneca

“change everything you don’t like about your life. But when you come to a thing you can’t change, then change the way you think about it. You’ll see it new, and maybe a new way to change it.”
― Maya Angelou, The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou

“Ain't you thinkin' what's it gonna be like when we get there? Ain't you scared it won't be nice like we thought?

No, she said quickly. No, I ain't. You can't do that. I can't do that. It's too much - livin' too many lives. Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes, it'll on'y be one.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“She embellished the facts because she was aware that life is how we tell it, so why would she jot down trivia?”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“Constable N stepped away from the car, into the darkness where Darren could not see where his gun was pointing, and fired two rounds into the air. The gunshots cracked the roof of the night sky and echoed back at us. My first thought was that they could be heard all over Toekomsrus; I wondered how many imaginations had in that instant conjured a different story to explain the gunshots; a record of all those stories, I found myself thinking, would probably document every fear this place has of itself and its young men.”
― Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South African

“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”
― Will Rogers

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss