Michelle > Michelle's Quotes

“Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.”
― John Irving, My Movie Business: A Memoir

“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“She blamed the lack of real flowers on both weather and the war, and instead put four or five pieces of coal in glass bowls, added water, salt, and ammonia, before finally pouring a mixture of violet and blue ink over them. It was a complete mystery to me how this alchemy would result in anything resembling flowers, but they were “blooming” within the hour.”
― Sara Gruen, At the Water's Edge

“I stared at him for a long time. If he wanted to end his search for the beast, he need look no further than a mirror.”
― Sara Gruen, At the Water's Edge

“It seems there’s nothing so good or pure it can’t be taken without a moment’s notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway.”
― Sara Gruen, At the Water's Edge

“Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“it's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said.

"DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT."

"I learned it from you," I told him.

"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Angry people are not always wise.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
― Jane Austen

“Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“After all, tomorrow is another day!”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears. ”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“To me, the highlight of the event is watching a reenactor in a long striped dress sitting alone on a blanket, winding yarn. Absorbed in the task of wrapping strands of wool around her hand, she never looks up. Watching her is so mesmerizing and oddly sacred that it never occurs to me to interrupt her and ask her name or how she got into the yarn-winding reenactment biz, maybe because she isn’t recreating; she is creating.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway—its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“That summer, the one you’ll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images—the same Avatar, same Harry Potter, same Fast and the Furious, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion? Also,”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“CHANCE RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH ALL OUR LIVES, AND BEING PREPARED FOR SURPRISE IS THE BEST WE CAN DO.”
― Mike Robbins, 365 Inspirational Quotes: A Year of Daily Wisdom from Great Thinkers, Books, Humorists, and More

“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. JAMES JOYCE, AUTHOR”
― Mike Robbins, 365 Inspirational Quotes: A Year of Daily Wisdom from Great Thinkers, Books, Humorists, and More

“THIS BODY Happy, I listen to the tinny sounds of the great music I still hear.   Dazzling clear pure upper tones have disappeared but I am alive,   silvery and achy—like Beethoven I listen with my imagination not my senses   to the cascading notes that play on the cosmos, I listen with my heart   and dance to the bliss I would never have known without this human body. JANINE CANAN”
― June Cotner, Gratitude Prayers: Prayers, Poems, and Prose for Everyday Thankfulness