Michael Fournier > Michael's Quotes

“...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
― Truman Capote

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

“How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. ”
― Alfred de Musset

“I know a girl made of memories and phrases, lives her whole life in chapters and phases...”
― Jimmy Buffett

“...when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Anyone can be passionate but it takes real lovers to be silly.”
― Rose Franken

“Bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world
but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do
I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too.
well, I hope that if you are out there you read this and know that yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”
― Rebecca Katherine Martin

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”
― Poe

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
― Brene Brown

“He grinned. “I was trying to remember all the deadly sins the other day,” he said. “Greed,envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry…”
“I’m pretty sure irony isn’t a deadly sin.”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
“Lust,” she said. “Lust is a deadly sin.”
“And spanking.”
“I think that falls under lust.”
“I think it should have its own category,” said Jace. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry, lust, and spanking.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Lost Souls

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own