Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous

“To love and win is the best thing.
To love and lose, the next best.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers.”
― Ed Sullivan

“Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave, and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.”
― Alice Childress

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.”
― LeVar Burton

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

“If man's capacity for the fantastic took up as much of his imagination as his capacity for cruelty, the worlds, seen and unseen, might be very different.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse

“No matter how much kids beg to be treated like adults, nobody likes to let go of their childhood. You wish for it and dream of it and the second you have it, you wonder what you've done. You wonder what it is you've become.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse

“How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning Living for its own sake isn't life. People need meaning as much as they need air.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“[..] when a friendship has become a matter of arranging to meet, dates in diaries, agreement that next week or the next are 'no good', then it has been silently acknowledged that the old intimacy has gone.”
― A.N. Wilson, My Name Is Legion: A Novel

“You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)”
― Tad Williams, The Dirty Streets of Heaven

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

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

“Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this 'Ah', because there's something in them that's brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here's the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling 'why am I so ordinary?', you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn't realised or you'd forgotten human beings could shine so.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“Antoine and Marie-Anne de Lavoisier held out for Lamanon the prospect of something he had not even known he was missing till that day in May—not so much marriage between equals, although that did seem true of them, or even marriage based on love, although that was obviously the case as well, but the happy union of science and humanity within an individual, and the joy that was possible when one person, so self-integrated, encountered another such person.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“I used to think that people suffered more over sudden, unexpected deaths than over long, protracted ones, but I no longer think so. Grief always lands heavily.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls: A Novel

“If only men could do this - shed from their bodies and their selves the things that would destroy them.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“This was the other lesson of survival as a modern Frenchman: make oneself useful outside the country.”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“Who are we to take possession of this place?" he said. "These people have lived here for hundreds of years. Do they have no rights, simply because we have muskets?”
― Naomi J. Williams, Landfalls

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner