Haley > Haley's Quotes

“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.”
― John Updike, The Widows of Eastwick

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“As long as the sun rose each day, as long as they could behold it, there life was secure.”
― Margaret George, The Memoirs of Cleopatra

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.

Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained.”
― Ruth K. Westheimer

“She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time, though she hadn't understood why... Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world.”
― David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Drink today, and drown all sorrow;
You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow;
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death.”
― Ben Jonson

“People just don't understand how many men it takes to build one good man. Next time you're in Manhattan and you see one of those mighty skyscrapers going up, pay attention to how many men are engaged in the enterprise. It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower.”
― J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar: A Memoir

“may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back”
― Lucille Clifton

“...because I think that each time it's a new construction, as if everything has been reduced to ashes during the night, and he has to start from scratch. In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“Look around you--there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“There's something ugly about the flawless.”
― Dennis Lehane, Sacred

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life”
― Diane di Prima

“When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time.”
― Maya Angelou

“Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.”
― Thor Heyerdahl

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft