Abbey > Abbey's Quotes

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”
― Carrie Fisher

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
― Ida B. Wells-Barnett

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”
― Carrie Fisher

“Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.”
― Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“And I get up because it is the only thing I can do.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits,' Augustus said. 'And getting drunk on the porch.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”
― Patti Smith

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.”
― Patti Smith

“Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.”
― Patti Smith

“I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?”
― Patti Smith, M Train: A Memoir

“If Christianity were judged entirely by the quality of Christians, it would be a tough sale.”
― Michael Gerson

“Rome was built on the blood of Remus; the Republic was born from the death of Lucretia; the Empire grew from the assassination of Caesar.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome