Rita > Rita's Quotes

“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”
― David Nicholls, One Day

“Women sometimes allow you to be unfaithful to their love; they never allow you to wound their self-esteem.”
― Alexandre Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Nunca houve nada como o amor para nos ajudar a ver o mal. O amor é o antídoto da cenoura.”
― Miguel Esteves Cardoso, O amor é fodido

“O amor é fodido. Hei-de acreditar sempre nisto. Onde quer que haja amor, ele acabará, mais tarde ou mais cedo, por ser fodido.
É melhor do que morrer. Há coisas, como o álcool e os livros, que continuam boas. A morte é mais aborrecida.
Por que é que fodemos o amor? Porque não resistimos. É do mal que nos faz. Parece estar mesmo a pedir. De resto, ninguém suporta viver um amor que não esteja pelo menos parcialmente fodido. Tem de haver escombros. Tem de haver esperança. Tem de haver progresso para pior e desejo de regresso a um tempo mais feliz. Um amor só um bocado fodido pode ser a coisa mais bonita deste mundo”
― Miguel Esteves Cardoso, O amor é fodido

“As raparigas do Norte têm belezas perigosas, olhos impossíveis. Têm o ar de quem pertence a si própria. Olham de frente. Pensam em tudo e dizem tudo o que pensam. Confiam, mas não dão confiança. Acho-as verdadeiras. Acredito nelas. Gosto da vergonha delas, da maneira como coram quando se lhes fala e da maneira como podem puxar de um estalo ou de uma panela, quando se lhes falta ao respeito. São mulheres que possuem; são mulheres que pertencem. As mulheres do Norte deveriam mandar neste país. Têm o ar de que sabem o que estão a fazer.”
― Miguel Esteves Cardoso

“Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, "Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“There is always something left to love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”
― Harvey Pekar

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
― Coco Chanel

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“What do you want?"
"Just coffee. Black - like my soul.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“We met at the wrong time. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. Maybe one day years from now, we’ll meet in a coffee shop in a far away city somewhere and we could give it another shot.”
― Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

“I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.”
― Brian Moore

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“We are who we are, be­cause of those we choose to love and be­cause of those who love us.”
― Kate Mosse, The Winter Ghosts

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
― Edward Gorey

“We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.”
― Andrea Barrett

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before