Clarissa > Clarissa's Quotes

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, "Hi. Thanks for writing me!”
― Alvi Syahrin

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.”
― Ian McEwan, The Children Act

“Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.”
― Ian McEwan, The Children Act

“...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.”
― Markus Zusak

“I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
― John Muir

“I'm going to lie down. Please wake me up in a couple of don't.”
― Ruby Elliot

“Again. I beg everything again.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“For sorrow ends not, when it seemeth done.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“How many yous have you been?
How many,
Lined up inside,
Each killing the last?”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.
As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write.
As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall.
As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind. ”
― V.S. Pritchett

“The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. Hew saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the major-domo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called "the world," and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“¿Con cuántos años se es feliz? Sólo se es feliz en el pasado.”
― Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue