Lynne > Lynne's Quotes

“At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”
― Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.”
― May Sarton

“The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.

— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón”
― Mitch Glazer

“No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I just did some calculations and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“We...we could be friends.'

We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”
― Charles Bukowski

“in that drunken place
you would
like to hand your heart to her
and say
touch it
but then
give it back.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“We all need someone to look at us. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers.”
― Milan Kundera

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I hate feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings?”
― Augusten Burroughs

“There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“Even if our loved ones have assured us that they'll be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special.”
― Alain de Botton

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”
― Alain de Botton

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.”
― May Sarton

“I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White