sarah sadafi > sarah's Quotes

“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It's a bright summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”
― Frank O'Hara

“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.”
― Philip Roth

“But he could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I lived so carefully, thinking someone was watching. But the stage was empty, the audience never came.”
― Osamu Dazai

“Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“As soon as I saw you I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.”
― A.A. Milne

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own