Elizabeth Cárdenas > Elizabeth's Quotes

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.”
― Charles Darwin

“Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.”
― Connie Willis, Bellwether

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Reading is like looking through several windows which open to an infinite landscape....For me life without reading would be like being in prison, it would be as if my spirit were in a straightjacket; life would be a very dark and narrow place.”
― Isabel Allende

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

“Men always remember a woman who caused them concern and uneasiness.”
― Coco Chanel

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“A veces, para exorcizar los demonios de un recuerdo es necesario contarlo como un cuento”
― Isabel Allende, Cuentos de Eva Luna

“I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.”
― Sarah Vowell

“Men live by rules they've made for themselves. And among those rules is one specifying that women are merely commodities for men to possess. A daughter belongs to her father, a wife to her husband. A woman's own desires present obstacles for men and are best ignored.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

“Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'.”
― Connie Willis

“Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?”
― Kiran Desai

“The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.”
― Paul Theroux

“The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.”
― Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“You look ridiculous if you dance
You look ridiculous if you don't dance
So you might as well
dance.”
― Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road