Haley > Haley's Quotes

“Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”
― Henry James

“We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“I felt shocked and then saddened. life does this to you sometimes - leads you up a path and then drops you in the shit, to mix a metaphor.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever,
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle:—
Why not I with thine?

See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:—
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Joy, once lost, is pain”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Fear not for the future, weep not for the past”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.
We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.
We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;
It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free.
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability!”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien