Melissa > Melissa's Quotes

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Never will I succeed in putting as much strength in a portrait as there is in a head. The mere fact of living demands such willpower and energy … ALBERTO GIACOMETTI”
― Peter Stamm, All Days Are Night

“I was just telling Claire about a guy I met in bread class. I hate him, but he could be my soul mate.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“It was life itself that was to be her further school, and she was absorbed in its class.”
― Stuart Shotwell, Edmund Persuader

“...because I rant not, neither rave of what I feel, can you be so shallow as to dream that I feel nothing? ”
― R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone

“May be we are not such fools as we look. But though we be, we are well content, so long as we may be two fools together.”
― R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone

“If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”
― Neil Peart

“Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And the browns gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.


I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.”
― Jack Gilbert

“Failing and Flying"

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”
― Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires

“It is Sunday. The weekend, that three-day festival of attrition, is done. Sunday is the day of purgation and redress; of tenderised brain cases and see-sawing stomachs and hollow pledges to never, ever get that twisted again.”
― Colin Barrett, Young Skins

“If you don’t start with crazy, crazy love, the kind of love that Van Morrison sings about, then you don’t have a shot to go the distance. Love’s a marathon, Danny, not a sprint.”
― Caroline Kepnes, You

“I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.”
― Sandy Welch

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“I don't always understand other people's motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don't mind. I don't always understand other people's motives.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The House of Madame Tellier and Other Stories

“I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“Well, I think adultery is a filthy habit,' said Rose, 'like using someone else's toothbrush.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Sin Eater

“Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“Daydreams of wealth or women must have given Carolo that faraway look which never left him; sad and silent, he contemplated huge bank balances and voluptuous revels.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

“I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.”
― Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

“A Petersburg street in autumn permeates the whole organism: chills the marrow and tickles the shuddering backbone; but as soon as you come from it into some warm premises, the Petersburg street runs in your veins like a fever. The”
― Andrei Bely, Petersburg