Ruby Hollyberry > Ruby's Quotes

“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

“There are no ordinary cats.”
― Colette

“In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.”
― Colette

“Time spent with a cat is never wasted.”
― Colette

“I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days. ”
― Colette

“There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.”
― John Ruskin

“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.”
― John Ruskin

“Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.”
― John Ruskin

“When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.”
― John Ruskin

“If some people see angels where others only see empty space, let them paint the angels; only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.”
― John Ruskin, Modern Painters: Volume 4. Of Mountain Beauty

“In order that people may be happy in their work,
these three things are needed:
they must be fit for it;
they must not do too much of it;
and they must have a sense of success in it.”
― John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism

“Perhaps some of my hearers this evening may have occasionally heard it stated of me that I am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do so. I never met wth a question yet, of any importance, which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times: but once must do for this evening.”
― John Ruskin

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

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
― Oscar Wilde

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“They will come back, come back again,
As long as the red earth rolls.
He never wasted a leaf or a tree.
Do you think he would squander souls?”
― Ruyard Kipling

“I couldn't live where there were no trees--something vital in me would starve.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

“Fear is the original sin. Almost all of the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.It is a cold slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Blue Castle

“A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Don't be led away by those howls about realism. Remember-pine woods are just as real as pigsties and a darn sight pleasanter to be in.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“It was three o'clock in the morning – the wisest and most accursed hour of the clock. But sometimes it sets us free.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Blue Castle

“Fairyland is the loveliest word because it means everything the human heart desires.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Selected Journals Of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 3: 1921-1929

“She looked like a head-on collision between a fashion plate and a nightmare.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

“I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial," said Anne, rather scornfully. "Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted toward each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.”
― L. M. Montgomery