Ami > Ami's Quotes

“Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
― J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.”
― Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

“Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Stop looking at me like that."
Sorry, I just wanted to savor the moment," Mom replied.
What moment?" I asked.
You're in first place," she said, and then began washing the windows.”
― Lisa Lutz

“There’s power in the touch of another person’s hand. We acknowledge it in little ways, all the time. There’s a reason human beings shake hands, hold hands, slap hands, bump hands.

“It comes from our very earliest memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color, deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes that first horror, that original state of terror?

“The touch of another person’s hands.

“Hands that wrap us in warmth, that hold us close. Hands that guide us to shelter, to comfort, to food. Hands that hold and touch and reassure us through our very first crisis, and guide us into our very first shelter from pain. The first thing we ever learn is that the touch of someone else’s hand can ease pain and make things better.

“That’s power. That’s power so fundamental that most people never even realize it exists.”
― Jim Butcher, Skin Game

“You're having one of those days of accumulating misery when you argue violently with someone in a position of power: a bank teller, a dry cleaner, a three-year-old.”
― Liane Moriarty, Three Wishes

“Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“But Catherine did not know her own advantages - did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”
― Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
― William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

“The only thing missing was Miles. But he was probably circling somewhere, destroying villages and hoarding gold in his mountain lair.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“It [Ashfair House] was an old fashioned house—the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I don't know if I even believe in that anymore. The right guy. The perfect guy. The one. I've lost faith in "the".
How do you feel about "a" and "an"?
Indifferent.
So you're considering a life without articles?”
― Rainbow Rowell, Attachments

“We all know that it is women who make the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life

“If it were easy to resist, it would not be called chocolate cake.”
― Maryrose Wood, The Mysterious Howling

“I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical or worse - and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent.
Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser's case I think I was focused mainly on his name): George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copperfield, she might seduce him).”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”
― CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

“A little glitter can turn your whole day around.”
― Barbara Park, Junie B., First Grader: Shipwrecked

“His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

“Hester received Punishment Flair. She was sent an A to wear upon her chest and told she must stand before the town with her baby, Pearl.
Hester is not enjoying her flair.”
― Sarah Schmelling, Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.”
― Helen Keller

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard''s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.”
― Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”