Herself Defined > Herself Defined's Quotes

“The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.”
― Andre Maurois

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
― Frida Kahlo

“The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.”
― Stanley Fish

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
― Thomas Paine, A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal on the Affairs of North America

“Rain falls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end, every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That’s how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn’t make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“One must dare to be happy. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
― Edward Abbey

“If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“We never know the quality of someone else's life, though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgement.”
― Tami Hoag, Dark Horse

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Don't compromise yourself - you're all you have.”
― John Grisham, The Rainmaker

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Our finger prints don't fade from the lives we touch.”
― judy blume

“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”
― Mo Willems, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs

“Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”
― W.E.B. DuBois

“As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.”
― N. Scott Momaday

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Nothing lives long
Only the earth and mountains”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“Clocks will go as they are set, but man, irregular man, is never constant, never certain.”
― Thomas Otway

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird