Belle > Belle's Quotes

“The boy had found photo albums in his aunt Grace’s garage, the plastic pages separating with a loud kiss of time”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
― Edith Wharton

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“The Gestapo chief leaned forward. I'd like to send you home, old fellow," he said. "I'll take your word that you won't cause any more trouble."

I could not see father's face, only the erect carriage of his shoulders and the halo of white hair above them. But I heard his answer.

"If I go home today," he said evenly and clearly, "tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“I am not one of those women who can stand things.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.”
― Michael Shaara

“There were moments when you saw the people you loved for who they really were, separate from the baggage of projection and shared histories. When you saw them with fresh eyes, as a stranger might, and caught the feeling of the first time you loved them. Before the tears and the armor chinks. When there was still the possibility of perfection.”
― Blake Crouch, Pines

“But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn't listen to, won't remember, never got right, wasn't around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.”
― Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“For my mother’s fifty-eighth birthday I had all her emails from India printed into a book, along with the beautiful photographs she had taken on her journey.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

“When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“heal the roots, to see the tree grow vibrant.”
― Matthew Edward Hall, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“The tree of which we are branches on, makes choices yesterday, by the choices we make today.”
― Matthew Edward Hall, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“Each thinking mind is a political mind.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good