Niki D. > Niki's Quotes

“We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick, & Colon.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Must it ever be thus-that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of nature, overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a demon which perpetually pursues and harrasses me.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“I understood at once, I am not living, but actively dying. I am smoking, living unhealthily. I’m shutting down. I need to go the other way, inside. And it was so clear to me what I was doing. It was suddenly perfectly clear.
I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse. And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I’m going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I’m writing and will have a record of the anxiety.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Possible Side Effects

“I was a wallflower who planned to stay that way, who never imagined anybody else to be.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

“When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue.
Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Every day I observe more and more the folly of judging of others by ourselves; and I have so much trouble with myself, and my own heart is in such constant agitation, that I am well content to let others pursue their own course, if they only allow me the same privilege.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It's like people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“I’m only marginally qualified to be giving advice at all. My body mass index is certainly not ideal, I frequently use my debit card to buy things that cost less than three dollars because I never have cash on me, and my bedroom is so untidy it looks like vandals ransacked the Anthropologie Sale section. I’m kind of a mess.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me.”
― Diane Keaton, Then Again

“...I also have an extended family. The people who stayed. The people who became more than friends; the people who open the door when I knock. That's what it all boils down to. The people who have to open the door, not because they always want to but because they do.”
― Diane Keaton, Then Again

“There are all kinds of mix tapes. there is always a reason to make one.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

“Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“It makes me cry because it means that fewer and fewer people are believing it's cool to want what I want, which is to be married and have kids and love each other in a monogamous, long-lasting relationship.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“If you only have brains on your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them. Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“Animals, children, and the working class comprise the company in which I'll feel most at ease.”
― Russell Brand

“I struggle in these situations not to let my madness govern me, and to let the positive aspects of my character define my life.”
― Russell Brand, Booky Wook 2: This Time it's Personal

“I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“We are our own sculptors...Who can deny that passion and unkind thoughts show on the lines and expressions of our faces...young people seldom have these vices until they start getting old, so I love to be with them.”
― Joshua Zeitz

“It is the custom to look back on ourselves of the boom days with a disapproval that approaches horror...But it had its virtues, that old boom: Life was a great deal larger and gayer for most people, and the stampede to the Spartan virtues in times of war and famine shouldn't make us too dizzy to remember its hilarious glory.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, 'Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl'.”
― David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.

“My first boyfriend was black as well, but that doesn't prove I'm color-blind, just that I like big butts.”
― David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.

“States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don't want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.”
― David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.

“Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive. You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the contented, stress-free person you really are. There's a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris.”
― Walter Wells

“How unbelievably naïve we both were that night. We clung hard to each other, making vows we couldn't keep and should never have spoken aloud. That's how love is sometimes. I already loved him more than I'd ever loved anything or anyone. I knew he needed me absolutely, and I wanted him to go on needing me forever.”
― Paula McLain, The Paris Wife