Mira > Mira's Quotes

“The people must be the ones to win, not the war, because war has nothing to do with humanity. War is something inhuman.”
― Zlata Filipović

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Cherish your wilderness.”
― Maxine Kumin

“Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree. ”
― Joyce Kilmer, Trees & Other Poems

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”
― Charles Dickens

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.”
― Carolyn Kizer

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.”
― Jim Harrison

“We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Gustav Flaubert

“The world is so strange that maybe it’s perfectly logical.”
― Beth Lisick

“Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald

“Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.”
― Steven Spielberg

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“All is calm, all is bright.”
― Joseph Mohr

“It’s like when we read The Diary of Anne Frank in seventh grade, and I had the sneaking suspicion that I would have been a Nazi back then because I wouldn’t have had the guts to be anything else. Because I would have been too scared to not go along with the majority. Like, I would have been a passive sort of Nazi, but I still would have been a Nazi. I never said anything out loud, of course, but I remember reading that book in Ms. Peterson’s class and everyone was all, “Oh, I would’ve helped Anne. I would have rebelled. I don’t understand how people could have allowed this to happen, blah blah blah.” I mean,”
― Jennifer Mathieu, The Truth About Alice

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up ’cause they’re looking for ideas.”
― Paula Poundstone

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since days of long ago.”
― Robert Burns