Isa > Isa's Quotes

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“How can it be that this town is so full of people they're falling off the pavements and yet only in dreams am I in someone's arms?”
― Anjum Hasan, Difficult Pleasures

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison

“A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what's fiction?”
― Jerry Pinto

“He was a natural Protestant when I met him.", Em would say. "He protested everything.”
― Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom

“I wanted to understand her predicament because I was her son and I loved her with a helpless corroded love.”
― Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom

“I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.”
― Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom

“Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee.”
― Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom

“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
― Arundhati Roy

“The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe.”
― scarlett thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“To belittle, you have to be little.”
― Kahill Gibran, The Prophet

“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”
― Douglas Adams

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy