Audrey Ryan > Audrey's Quotes

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced”
― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

“Variety's the very spice of life, that gives it all it's flavour.”
― William Cowper

“but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
― Jane Austen

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Grief is itself a medicine.”
― William Cowper

“This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.”
― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

“She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present - she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.”
― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

“It didn't matter anyway...he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.”
― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

“He put his mouth on her and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth-thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip.”
― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“To you I shall say, as I have often said before, Do not be in a hurry, the right man will come at last...”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead; but I am afraid they're not alive. ”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted."
-- Jane Austen's Letters August 1796”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
― E.E. Cummings

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion