Sara > Sara's Quotes

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
― Adrienne Rich

“[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

“In a very real sense, people who have read good literature
have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
It is not true that we have only one life to lead; if we can read,
we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
”
― S. I. Hayakawa

“But the truth doesn't need to be known, or believed, to be true.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“Only the man who has known freedom
Can define his prison.”
― Catherine Fisher, Incarceron

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."

[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]”
― Steve Jobs

“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.”
― Cory Doctorow

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
― Isaiah Berlin

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

“I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.”
― Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling

“purposeful play builds self-confidence and real-world problem-solving skills.”
― Jane McGonigal, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient--Powered by the Science of Games

“A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“Every beginning, after all, is nothing but a sequel, and the book of events is always open in the middle.”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“We know ourselves only as far as we’ve been tested.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Map: Collected and Last Poems