Mona > Mona's Quotes

“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Whether he talked or not made little difference to my mood. My only enemy was the clock on the dashboard, whose hands would move relentlessly to one o'clock. We drove east, we drove west, amidst the myriad villages that cling like limpets to the Mediterranean shore, and today I remember none of them. All I remember is the feel of the leather seats, the texture of the map upon my knee, its frayed edges, its worn seams, and how one day, looking at the clock, I thought to myself, 'This moment now, at twenty past eleven, this must never be lost, ' and I shut my eyes to make the experience more lasting. When I opened my eyes we were by a bend in the road, and a peasant girl in a black shawl waved to us; I can see her now, her dusty skirt, her gleaming, friendly smile, and in a second we had passed the bend and could see her no more. Already she belonged to the past, she was only a memory. I wanted to go back again, to recapture the moment that had gone, and then it came to me that if we did it would not be the same, even the sun would be changed in the sky, casting another shadow, and the peasant girl would trudge past us along the road in a different way, not waving this time, perhaps not even seeing us. There was something chilling in the thought, something a little melancholy, and looking at the clock I saw that five more minutes had gone by. Soon we would have reached our time limit, and must return to the hotel. 'If only there could be an invention', I said impulsively, 'that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again." (Rebecca, chapter five)”
― Daphne du Maurier

“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“You don’t care what anyone thinks. You know?”
My ears burned. “I care what everyone thinks, Sohrab.”
“No you don’t. Not really. You don’t try to change yourself. You know who you are.” He bumped shoulders with me. “I wish I was like that. I always try to be what my mom needs. What my amou needs. What you need. But you are the opposite. You are happy with who you are.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s really me. You’ve never seen what it’s like back home. How everyone treats me.”
“They don’t know you, Darioush.” Sohrab grabbed my shoulder. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”
“I wish you could see yourself too.” I swallowed. “You’re the only person who never wanted me to change.”
― Adib Khorram, Darius the Great Is Not Okay

“I would die for you. But I won't live for you.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Why are they all staring?" demanded Albus as he and Rose craned around to look at the other students.
"Don’t let it worry you," said Ron. "It’s me. I’m extremely famous.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“He must have known I'd want to leave you."
"No, he must have known you would always want to come back.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“IF WE DIE FOR THEM, I'LL KILL YOU, HARRY!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.”
― Harlan Coben, Promise Me

“I read like the flame reads the wood.”
― Alfred Döblin

“You're never alone when you're reading a book.”
― Susan Wiggs

“How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you.”
― Ruskin Bond - Delhi is not far

“I don't want to rot like mangoes at the end of the season, or burnout like the sun at the and of the day. I cannot live like the gardener, the cook and water-carrier, doing the same task everyday of my life... I want to be either somebody or nobody. I don't want to be anybody.”
― Ruskin Bond, The Room on the Roof

“So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“This moment will just be another story someday.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn't try to sleep with someone even if they could have. I need to know these people exist.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."
Vronsky”
― Leo Tolstoy, Ana Karenina

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“For instance, this new idea that You-Know-Who can kill with a single glance from his eyes. That’s a basilisk, listeners. One simple test: Check whether the thing that’s glaring at you has got legs. If it has, it’s safe to look into its eyes, although if it really is You-Know-Who, that’s still likely to be the last thing you ever do.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.”
- But there’s no place like that in this world.
- Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore