Maya Chhabra > Maya's Quotes

“She was dark, thin, healthy, good-looking, clever, ambitious, rich, unsatisfied, perhaps unscrupulous — but not without a conscience.”
― Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux

“And you have fixed my life — however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.”
― Wilfred Owen, Selected Letters

“I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair
But mocks the steady running of the hour
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here”
― Wilfred Owen

“Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance and her sunlight, from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly, nor song of bird; in the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he cannot escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star.
...
As though it said to man, 'Behold my work. and yours.”
― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

“Have you ever loved anything?"

Yes. Yes. All the wrong things. The hunt, and darkness, and winter, and you, Godmother.”
― Elizabeth Wein, The Winter Prince

“I have felt so many loves so deeply: love of friends, love somewhere between friendship and romance that our society doesn’t define, love of art, love of life, love of death, love of language, so many loves such a multitude more than romance. Yet I have never been in a “relationship.”
― Noella Handley

“There are no longer any real passions in the nineteenth century: that's why one is so bored in France. People commit acts of the greatest cruelty, but without any feeling of cruelty.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“So—there were still four hundred scabs, and it was painful to think of them as scabs because they were just like the others, but they were frightened. They were frightened because they were hungry now, but if they lost their jobs they would be hungrier, and winter was coming. Winter haunted them all because there was only scrub cotton to pick for awhile, maybe a few oranges now and then, maybe not anything. There were colds and flu and pneumonia, and babies being born and unborn, and school, and shoes wearing out. There were old men and women dying, and sometimes the young died before their time. Babies died. Life was just a little thing to them: a shrunken breast, a colorless tent wall in their curious sight, hunger without name and explanation, pain, and the dark. Sometimes in the short winter days, the mothers looked at old magazines and saw ads for milk and pretty blankets and lacy pillows, and insurance for your baby’s education, and sometimes they found articles about how to care for a baby, and they knew why their babies died. They knew anyway. Often they wondered why their babies did not die, how they could survive without all the things necessary to babies in the outside world.”
― Sanora Babb, Whose Names Are Unknown

“No disgrace to be poor," as Mrs. Starwood says, "but cussed unhandy.”
― Sanora Babb, Whose Names Are Unknown