Kirsten > Kirsten's Quotes

“How clever you are, to know something of which you are ignorant.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
― Maya Angelou

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.”
― Laurie Notaro, It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.”
― Carson McCullers

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

“One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.”
― Agatha Christie

“That's when you know for sure somebody loves you. They figure out what you need and they give it to you -- without you asking.”
― Adriana Trigiani, Very Valentine

“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”
― Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books

“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz

“Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.”
― Garrison Keillor, Dusty And Lefty: The Lives of the Cowboys

“Suddenly, however, the dastardly department of my personality presented two plans, one of which involved dynamite, mustache wax, some rope, and train tracks . . . which I rejected due to financial investment.”
― Laurie Notaro, It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy

“Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.”
― Laurie Notaro, I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies): True Tales of a Loudmouth Girl

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“The Lord help us!' he soliloquised in an undertone of peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no reference to my unexpected advent.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.”
― John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

“I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves.”
― John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

“Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face.”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Volume 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together