Shona > Shona's Quotes

“I've been practicing in my mind, trying to find some words, but they've all been taken, all used for ordinary considerations that mean nothing in comparison to what he has meant. We say "Thank you very much" and "I so appreciate what you have done" to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offer us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether?”
― Laura McBride, We Are Called To Rise

“The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“If I've learned anything at all from the river it's to let jarring events come and go, that such tiny disruptions have no more weight in the world than fallen leaves on the water. A few ripples, a barely audible splash, and the surface soon returns to order. To swim toward each intrusion, to fish out a leaf and to sling it ashore, only prolongs the disturbance.”
― Steve Himmer, The Bee-Loud Glade

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. ”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

“Men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.”
― Lloyd Jones

“You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.”
― Lloyd Jones

“I fix myself a hot chocolate because it is a gateway drug to reading.”
― Helen Ellis, American Housewife

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

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

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

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