Catherine > Catherine's Quotes

“I’ve never cared whether I shock people because I think people shocked by the truth are not deserving of the truth. The truth is something one has to deserve”
― Tennessee Williams

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
― George Burns

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins

“I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”
― Tennessee Williams

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.”
― Roseanne Barr

“I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on.”
― Roseanne Barr

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
― Mark Twain

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
― Mark Twain

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
― Mark Twain

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
― Mark Twain

“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”
― Mark Twain

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
― Mark Twain

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
― Mark Twain

“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is a long lesson in humility.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister

“In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.”
― Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown.”
― Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.”
― Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Our responsibility is to tell you the truth. But since you were never told the truth, you will believe it a lie. Lies are more affectionate than truth and embrace with both arms.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets