Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“Sometimes when people’s faith changes, so must their church.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
― Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we’re talking is God.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat.”
― Chuck Wendig, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing

“I am waiting to write the poem that is something like a dance movie, the ones populated by fair haired ballerinas with just a little bit of singe to their tulle, not quite as dark as the Natalie Portman one, but girls woefully misunderstood by their parents or harboring dead mothers and sad pasts.”
― Kristy Bowen, I Hate You James Franco

“Maybe any love we ever have is an angel in whatever form...”
― Francesca Lia Block

“If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

“The basis of art is change in the universe.”
― Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa

“I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment.”
― Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa

“Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.”
― Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa

“It might be a good idea...to start washing the laundry right at your feet. Of course it's important to think about what lies ahead, too...but if you only look at what's down the road...you'll get tangled in the laundry at your feet and you'll fall, won't you? You see...it's also important to think about what you can do now, what you can do today. And if you keep washing things one day at a time...you'll be done before you know it. Because fortune is looking out for you.”
― Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket, Vol. 8

“Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“God not only plays dice, he also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.”
― Stephen Hawking

“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
― Edith Wharton

“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Think of his misery; think of his danger — look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair — soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?"

Still indomitable was the reply — "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad — as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth — so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am quite insane — quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine fo food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value -- to press my lips to what I love -- to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice." - Jane”
― Charlotte Brontë

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Now say, have women worth, or have they none?
Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?
Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long,
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason
Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was treason."
(In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth)”
― Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet

“And why should he interest himself at all in my moral and intellectual capacities: what is it to him what I think and feel?' I asked myself. And my heart throbbed in answer to the question.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“When we had surmounted the acclivity, I was about to withdraw my arm from his, but by a slight tightening of the elbow was tacitly informed that such was not his will, and accordingly desisted.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own