Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.”
― Anne Sexton

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”
― Albert Camus

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it”
― Buddha

“Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”
― Buddha

“Doubt everything. Find your own light.”
― Gautama Buddha, Sayings of Buddha

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?”
― Jeanette Winterson

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?”
― A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Goddamn sometimes I only want this feeling to stay and last.”
― Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry

“I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.”
― Nicole Krauss

“The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.”
― Mary Oliver

“My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing,
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry

“What should I be
but just what I am?”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay