jessa ༒︎ > jessa ༒︎'s Quotes

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“No amount of worrying can change the future. Go easy on yourself, for the outcome of all affairs is determined by God's decree. If something is meant to go elsewhere, it will never come your way, but if it is yours by destiny, from you it cannot flee.”
― Umar Ibn Al-Khattaab

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
― Earl Nightingale

“She has no idea. The effect she can have.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Deep in the meadow, hidden far away
A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray
Forget your woes and let your troubles lay
And when it's morning again, they'll wash away
Here it's safe, here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm
Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“If you've got time to fantasize about a beautiful death, why not live beautifully until the end?”
― Sorachi Hideaki

“I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
― Mary Shelley

“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I don't want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.”
― Anne Carson

“I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn't even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn't talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.”
― Yiwei Chai

“THERE'S NO REASON TO SLEEP
CURLED UP AND BENT.
IT'S NOT COMFORTABLE,
IT'S NOT GOOD FOR YOU, AND IT
DOESN'T PROTECT YOU FROM DANGER.
IF YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT AN ATTACK
YOU SHOULD STAY AWAKE
OR SLEEP LIGHTLY WITH
LIMBS UNFURLED FOR ACTION.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness & devours views from windows (stories, movies, overheard talk &sights in the street, pictures in newspapers, etc.) with continuous feeling she is 'just about', miraculously, to come into her own her own life”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator

“I treat myself like I would my daughter. I brush her hair, wash her laundry, tuck her in goodnight. Most importantly, I feed her. I do not punish her. I do not berate her, leave tears staining her face. I do not leave her alone. I know she deserves more. I know I deserve more.”
― Michelle K.