Anna > Anna's Quotes

“Many of the things most cherished in our lives are those realized only through great difficulty or in the face of adversity, and among those are, so often, friendship, love, faith, and hope.”
― Loren R. Graham, Moscow Stories

“I heard you could do that—buy books by the yard, turn them into furniture. People are dumb. I’ll never get over how dumb people are.”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“Tell your secret to the wind, but don't blame it for telling the trees.”
― Khalil Gibran

“-It'll take a hell of a long time, but one day they will have their piece of the world, and my grandchildren will be going to school with their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And whites will be marrying colored. And everyone becoming some kind of light shade if brown. That's what it'll be one day.”
― Brad Watson

“[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

“Happy is one of the many things I'm likely to be over the course of a day and certainly over the course of a lifetime. But I think if you have the expectation that you're going to be happy throughout your life--more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time--well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“You know what's funny about death? I mean other than absolutely nothing at all? You'd think we could remember finding out we weren't immortal. Sometimes I see children sobbing airports and I think, "Aww. They've just been told.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“I call people sometimes hoping not only that they’ll verify the fact that I’m alive but that they’ll also, however indirectly, convince me that being alive is an appropriate state for me to be in. Because sometimes I don’t think it’s such a bright idea. Is it worth the trouble it takes trying to live life so that someday you get something worthwhile out of it, instead of it almost always taking worthwhile things out of you?”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“Because what can you do with people that like you, except, of course, inevitably disappoint them?”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditation Marcus Aurelius: Thoughts & Life Lessons of Wise Emperor