Layla > Layla's Quotes

“I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Here lies a toppled god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.”
― Stephen King

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Thus we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“They's a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there."
Arvin asks, "More than a hundred?"
Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. "Yeah, at least that many.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah