Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“The rain to the wind said,
You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged--though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.”
― Robert Frost

“In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed-- But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me
broken-hearted.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Then she stopped on one tree, one that must be dying. The branches were bare, stark, hardly moving in the wind. How was it Iris had never noticed this tree before? Such a delicate web of boughs and knots and air, it made her feel for the bare branches, made her feel she too was a bare branch, all alone in the air, and made her want to possess, to own, the beauty of those branches. But how?”
― Laura Jacobs

“If you can show a person logical proof that essentianlly he's got nothing to cry about, he'll stop crying. That seems clear. Don't you think he'd stop crying?'
"That would make life too easy," Raskolnikov replied.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Without strength you get nothing. But strength must be won by strength. That's just what they don't know”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even, and the impassive way I'd treated them”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

“sometimes I feel my heart fall to vague depths between words
there are such spaces that I can't help but feel my heart fall between the pregnant pause of all you will not say
and all i can not ask”
― Jewel Kilcher

“I didn't see why loving someone had to have so much agony attached to it. It felt like a series of fresh cuts in the skin of my heart”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

“She didn't even know how dangerous the truth could be, all the tiny, shattering seeds it carried.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

“As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.”
― Kate Chopin

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”
― Walt Whitman

“there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.”
― Truman Capote, The Thanksgiving Visitor

“Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”
― Euripides, Medea

“Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.”
― Euripides

“tell me how does it feel with my teeth in your heart!”
― Euripides, Medea

“What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?”
― Euripides, Medea

“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some devine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“There is a certain inherent humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, confirming, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“confrontations with our doppelgangers inevitably raise existentially destabilizing questions.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.”
― Winston S. Churchill