Dannielle Insalaco > Dannielle's Quotes

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn't breaking. It hurts because it's getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Riding Shotgun

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“It is better, I think, to grab at the stars than to sit flustered because you know you cannot reach them.”
― R.A. Salvatore, Sojourn

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson Mandela

“Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.”
― Dave Eggers

“I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid

“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
― Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“This is the root of all catastrophe in the family: no one ever knows when to call it a day.”
― Emma Brockes, She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me