Molly > Molly's Quotes

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city - a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.”
― Edward Albee

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“She was anxious to be someone, and, no one having ever voiced a prejudice in her hearing without impressing her, had come to associate prejudice with identity. You could not be someone without disliking things.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“Leopold was not even interested in hurting, and was only tweaking her petals off or her wings off with the intention of exploring himself. His dispassionateness was more dire, to Henrietta, than cruelty. With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“To foresee pleasures makes anybody a poet...to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“For God's sake, is there no plain man?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not matter whether you have good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.”
― Isak Dinesen

“Camping-places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember the curve of your waggon track in the grass of the plain, like the features of a friend.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“The tropical night has the companionability of a Roman Catholic Cathedral compared to the Protestant Churches of the North, which let you in on business only. Here in the great room everybody comes and goes, this is the place where things are going on.”
― Isak Dinesen

“The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key,—the minor key,—to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word of tragedy means in itself unpleasantness.”
― Isak Dinesen

“Therefore does the world love the Swedes, because in the midst of their woes they can draw it all to their bosom and be so galant that they shine a long way away.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. The”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“But oh how sure I am that it is so much better to have love with all its pains and terrors and fanaticism than to live untouched the life of the vegetable. But how it tears one, and how unruhig it is.”
― Stevie Smith