Maya Gavi > Maya's Quotes

“Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.”
― Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys

“High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
― John Gillespie MaGee Jr.

“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

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”
― Phyllis Diller

“One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. ... I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

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

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”
― Caroline Gordon

“Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. ”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”
― Stewart O'Nan, The Odds: A Love Story

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.”
― Ovid

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”
― Alex Haley

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.”
― Robert Burns, The complete poetical works of Robert Burns

“and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“union of opposites to form human nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalize away their imperfections. Maybe it was just too neat, and the truth was that evil deeds trumped good ones. It didn’t matter, for example, that Hitler was kind to dogs.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire

“How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.
how will hear these notes when the train slides
into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song

lingers with breaths rising from empty seats?
I know I am too human to praise what is fading.
But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills

completely with warm water, and we are all
swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart
flowing from his hands. I want nothing

but to put my fingers inside his mouth,
let that prayer hum through my veins.
I want crawl into the hole in his violin.

I want to sleep there
until my flesh
becomes music.”
― Ocean Vuong

“something about death that makes people want to live. We wanted to live that day, and I don’t blame us for it. Not anymore.”
― Jill Santopolo, The Light We Lost

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar