Renée > Renée's Quotes

“The ordinary can be like medicine.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice.
I'm traveling heavy with illusions.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Boredom: the desire for desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“God is the same everywhere.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”
― Erica Jong

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”
― John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Among the tortures and devestations of life is this
then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“My course is set for an uncharted sea.”
― Dante Alighieri

“And also don’t forget, the reason opportunity is often missed is that it usually comes disguised as hard work.”
― Clifford Irving, Trial

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin