Annah > Annah's Quotes

“Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.”
― Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths and Other Plays

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

“To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible.”
― Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms

“If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Labyrinth

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
― William Arthur Ward

“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

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter.”
― Anchee Min, Red Azalea: A Memoir

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

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.”
― Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron

“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“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

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.”
― Ved Mehta, All for Love

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”
― Louis Adamic

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

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

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

“You know how sometimes you lie in bed at night and think, “What if the law of gravity just wears out and lets go and I drift into space?” Does that ever make you anxious?”
― Elaine May

“We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.”
― Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance