Miranda > Miranda's Quotes

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

“If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
― Margaret Atwood

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”
― Margaret Atwood

“It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.”
― Betty Friedan

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“But I think Cybil was my biggest fan. She cut out my articles and hung them in her locker and we were always cracking up how if you wrote the simplest, most obvious thing in the world people thought you were a genius.”
― Blake Nelson, Girl

“She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Garden Spells

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting. There may be a time when this symbol means something treacherous and terrible, rather than something noble and literate.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“I was just telling Claire about a guy I met in bread class. I hate him, but he could be my soul mate.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper

“Once again, I've been thwarted by the massive difference between my vision of the successful me and the me I'm currently stuck with.”
― Lauren Graham, Someday, Someday, Maybe

“The only thing better than singing is more singing.”
― Ella Fitzgerald

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.”
― Maryrose Wood, The Hidden Gallery

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country