Sandra > Sandra's Quotes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times, a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.”
― Margaret Wise Brown

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“My first words, as I was being born [...] I looked up at my mother and said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those.”
― Stephen Fry

“Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul”
― Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Зеленый шатер

“Naposletku, sto bi rekao moj dobri prijatelj - cim pomislis da ti nesto pripada, izgubio si.”
― Staša Vuk., Ja sam Staša

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ”
― Robert Frost

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.
-Albus Dumbledore”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“And I, infinitesima­l being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

“I wish to know the unknowable. To see what no mortal has seen. To peel back the carpeting of the world and tumble into the stars.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."

[The Autumnal]”
― John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose