Amanda Hoffmann > Amanda's Quotes

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I watched the early morning light pass over and through the windows of colored glass, leaving streaks of red and green and yellow on the stone floor. When I was little, I used to try and capture the colored light. I thought I could hold it in my hand and carry it home. Now I know it is like happiness-- it is there or it is not, you cannot hold it or keep it.”
― Karen Cushman, Catherine, Called Birdy

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
― Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam and Eve

“When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."

[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]”
― Salman Rushdie

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
― John Green

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Nevsky Avenue

"Here you come across moustaches so wonderful that neither pen nor brush can do justice to them, moustaches to which the best years of a lifetime have been devoted-the object of long hours of vigil by day and by night; moustaches upon which all the perfumes of Arabia have been lavished, the most exquisite scents and essences, and which have been anointed with the rarest and most precious pomades; moustaches which are wrapped up for the night in the most delicate vellum; moustaches for which their possessors show a most touching affection and which are the envy of all those who behold them. ”
― Gogol Nikolai

“We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants...I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. she walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. She knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.

People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism?

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them.

'How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
― Dr. Seuss

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
― L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“It's an illusion I've noticed before-- words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.”
― Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire

“There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, 'If you know where you are, then please tell others.”
― Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity

“I'd rather take coffee than compliments just now.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is only one perfect child in the world and every mother has him.”
― Lisa See, China Dolls

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.”
― Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train