Teardra > Teardra's Quotes

“My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room With a View

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.”
― Seneca

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."
-All Quiet On The Western Front, Chapter 12”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“I think you should weep, now. It's time.”
― Edward Rutherfurd

“Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than to just be... safe. At least she knows she's living.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn