Catherine Mustread > Catherine 's Quotes

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.”
― Cara Black, Murder in the Bastille

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“...the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“The scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, The Fresco

“And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.”
― James Clavell, King Rat

“I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

“When you first heard him talking about it, you'd figure he was batshit crazy, but really, he was just trying to fill up his days so he didn't have to think about what a fucking mess he had made of everything. It's the same for most of us; forgetting our lives might be the best we'll ever do.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Each moment is a place
you've never been.”
― Mark Strand, New Selected Poems

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
― William Arthur Ward

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“In every decision there must be some regrets.”
― Ellis Peters, The Virgin in the Ice

“Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.”
― Charles Lamb

“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. ”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”
― Salman Rushdie, In the South

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“The sky sinks slowly inside the past.”
― Barbara Guest

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“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

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel