Maye > Maye's Quotes

“so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...

So ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“At the college where I teach, I'm surrounded by circus people. We aren't tightrope walkers or acrobats. We don't breathe fire or swallow swords. We're gypsies, moving wherever there's work to be found. Our scrapbooks and photo albums bear witness to our vagabond lives: college years, grad-school years, instructor-mill years, first-job years. In between each stage is a picture of old friends helping to fill a truck with boxes and furniture. We pitch our tents, and that place becomes home for a while. We make families from colleagues and students, lovers and neighbors. And when that place is no longer working, we don't just make do. We move on to the place that's next. No place is home. Every place is home. Home is our stuff. As much as I love the Cumberland Valley at twilight, I probably won't live there forever, and this doesn't really scare me. That's how I know I'm circus people. ”
― Cathy Day, The Circus In Winter: A Debut Literary Novel of Family, Love, and Small-Town Dreams

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.”
― Virginia Woolf

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“...how much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners...”
― Nikolai Gogol

“I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never by conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“After all of this, I was beginning to feel that the way people got news shouldn’t be in the hands of the government, but rather in its citizens’. The motivated few who could keep tabs on those in charge, and make sure they weren’t breaking the rules or abusing their power. Ensure they were doing their jobs, honestly and with integrity.”
― Bella Forrest, The Gender End

“Please help yourself to the tea, but talk and drink—I am old.” “Alyssa, thank you so much for this,” Morgan said, and Alyssa held up a hand. “By ‘old,’ I meant ‘impatient and cranky.’ Let’s get to the point.”
― Bella Forrest, The Gender End