Ben > Ben's Quotes

“Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. ”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
― Chris Abani

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”
― Stewart O'Nan, The Odds: A Love Story

“I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.”
― Jonathan Ames, My Less Than Secret Life: A Diary, Fiction, Essays

“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”
― Leonora Carrington

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.”
― Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us: The Achingly Sensual Political Poetry from a Journalist in El Salvador

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.”
― Marvin Bell

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

“Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Come to me, squeeze my hand, know my loneliness, and give me the love, the strength to prevail on the perilous road before me.”
― Dang Thuy Tram

“Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.”
― André Aciman

“It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed.”
― Ismail Kadare, Broken April