Janet Barclay > Janet's Quotes

“Don't sit back and be a bystander of your own life”
― Caprice Crane, Forget About It

“although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I would rather suffer than experience nothing.”
― Sara Seager, The Smallest Lights In The Universe

“It isn't what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“He's got this thing about Canada. He says it's like America only with health care and no guns, and you can live up to your potential there and not have to worry about what society thinks or about getting sick or getting shot.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Death doesn't matter
It makes no difference to life.
We will always remain what we were to each other.”
― Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

“What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“It was said that there was a smile at the corners of his lips from the moment of his birth, and from early boyhood he was a specialist in in appropriate interjections.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings

“For most of us, Facebook friends and Instagram followers are supplements to -- not surrogates for -- our social lives. As meaningful as the friendships we establish online can be, most of us are unsatisfied with virtual ties that never develop into face-to-face relationships. Building real connections requires a shared physical environment -- a social infrastructure.”
― Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

“I’m very into the idea of sorting things out through superior paperwork. This is my favorite transformatory power.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“I would love someone to empirically tell me what I should do. Having to guess - improvise - all the time is so wearying.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“That is the work of your teenage years - to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly...

They do not tell you this when you are fourteen, because the people who would tell you - your parents - are the very ones who built the thing you're so dissatisfied with. They made you how they want you. They made you how they need you. They built you with all they know, and love - and so they can't see what you're not: all the gaps you feel leave you vulnerable. All the new possibilities ony imagined by your geenration, and nonexistent to theirs. They have done their best... but now it's up to you, small, brave future, to do your best with what you have.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else. ”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“I start trembling at the very thought of the unplanned and unknown, but inevitable and unstoppable force with which parents leave traces in their children that, like traces of branding, can never be erased. The outlines of parental will and fear are written with a white-hot stylus in the souls of the children who are helpless and ignorant of what is happening to them. We need a whole life to find and decipher the branded text and we can never be sure we have understood it.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“None of us is expert in all situations. It is a sign of intelligence to recognize our limitations and of maturity to seek help when required.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Result

“Each day brings another handful of opportunities. It's up to you to make the best of what you're given.”
― Ami McKay, The Birth House

“Life happens so fast. I woke up a young man, at lunch I was middle aged, and by dinner I could imagine my own death. I long ago finished my wine, ale, and hors d'oeuvres, the main course was mostly a grand feast. Coffee has been served, and I hope for one last, sweet taste of dessert.”
― Sally Cole-Misch

“Lincoln couldn't help wondering if what had happened at Rockers was best viewed as an isolated incident or as part of a long-established pattern, one that could be summed up as Teddy's life not, to borrow Coffin's term, working out. Even back at Minerva, Teddy had seemed resigned to the likelihood that it wouldn't. Which begged a question: Had Teddy meekly accepted what he saw as the invisible trajectory of his life, or had he courageously accepted what he couldn't possibly change?”
― Richard Russo, Chances Are...

“More and more often they talked about the old days, back when they’d been too young to know that they were young, when the whole world had seemed open to them and dreams were as easy to pick as daisies.”
― Kristin Hannah, Firefly Lane

“Love. Family. Laughter. That’s what I remember when it’s all said and done. For so much of my life I thought I didn’t do enough or want enough. I guess I can be forgiven for my stupidity. I was young. I want my children to know how proud I am of them, and how proud I am of me. We were everything we needed—you and Daddy”
― Kristin Hannah, Fly Away

“Sometimes you just need to be around someone who loved you before you were a fully formed person. It’s like finding your favorite sweatshirt in the back of the closet, the one you forgot why you stopped wearing and once you find it again you sleep in it every night.”
― Christine Pride, We Are Not Like Them

“They say in our lives we'll meet something like eighty thousand people. Most of them just in passing, sitting beside them on a bus, buying a latte from them, overtaking them too fast on the motorway. Others will become friends, lovers, family. Some will stay in our lives forever, and some will be swept away by the flow of life. But we touch all of these people in some way, tiny or huge, making more of a difference than any of us can imagine.”
― Eva Woods, The Inbetween Days

“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”
― David Bowie

“Why be ordinary when you can be extraordinary?”
― Alan Dapre