Lisa > Lisa's Quotes

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown.”
― John O'Donohue

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
― Lewis Carroll

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”
― Stephen King, It

“... the devil doesn't come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you've ever wished for ...”
― Tucker Max, Assholes Finish First

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
― Mark Twain

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
― Maya Angelou

“I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
― Maya Angelou

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”
― Maya Angelou

“Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.”
― Maya Angelou

“The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.”
― Maya Angelou

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
― Maya Angelou

“Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it;
to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other.”
― Maya Angelou

“The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”
― Maya Angelou

“I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love – for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.”
― Maya Angelou

“Yet it is only love which sets us free.”
― Maya Angelou

“I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.”
― Maya Angelou

“Love is a condition so powerful; it may be that which pulls the stars in the firmament. It may be that which pushes and urges the blood in the veins. Courage: you have to have courage to love somebody because you risk everything – everything.”
― Maya Angelou

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
― Howard Zinn

“The spark of life is not gain. Nor is it luxury. The spark of life is movement. Color. Love. And furthermore...if you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur.”
― Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War

“You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even loved in spite of ourselves.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I would love to say
that you
make me
weak in the knees
but
to be quite upfront
and completely
truthful
you
make my body
forget
it has knees
at all.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson, Love Language

“You are the poem I never knew how to write and this life is the story I have always wanted to tell.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson