Bridget > Bridget's Quotes

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“...in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight -- 'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore' -- which evidently makes me look either as if I'm very rude and abrupt or as if I'm semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully...I've actually lost friends this way.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Do I look stupid?" snarled Uncle Vernon, a bit of fried egg dangling from his bushy mustache.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“I WILL NOT TOLERATE MENTION OF YOUR ABNORMALITY UNDER THIS ROOF!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“What does it mean?" Emily said, in a low, panicked voice: "What does it mean if a rainbow comes before rain?”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie

“I never saw anything like it. He was like the bit in the movie where Tom Cruise is a lawyer and he's decided he's really going to win this case, for the sake of justice and the American way, and that? And it's suddenly like bang-bang-bang—grabbing files off shelves and slamming them down on the desk and punching numbers in the telephone and shaking out the phone cord dramatically , and you know, snapping out instructions to all the assistants around the desk, like: "Get me all the phone records of the President of the United States for the last fifty years," and "Get me the names of every client who ever ate a banana," and "Let's get some Chinese take-out up here, on the double!”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Feeling Sorry for Celia

“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.”
― Markus Zusak

“Seriously, who has monogrammed pajamas?”
― Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian

“But the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair”
― relient k

“You know I could go for a sandwich, but uh, I'm not gonna open two jars. I can't be opening and closing all kinds of jars. And who knows how many knives!”
― Brian Regan

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“You want another one?" "Oh, I don't know: I've already had two whole, entire Fig Newtons. Maybe I could try to muscle one more down but I don't think I - Mmmm, I am stuffed to the wrappers!" They're nuts. "We got an ER here. We got a three Fig Newton eater." "How many did he have? What is he nuts? Doesn't he read?”
― Brian Regan

“And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“And it's amazing how much noise people ignoring each other can make.”
― Eoin Colfer, Benny and Babe

“I have to lay off dairy though. That's what my doctor threw in. As I was leaving his office, "Oh, and uh, leave off dairy." What kind of blanket sweep is that? "And no more happiness! Away with you!”
― Brian Regan

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Living is a horizontal fall.”
― Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments