Janet > Janet's Quotes

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.”
― Chuck Close

“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way- things I had no words for.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.”
― Jane Austen

“My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.'
'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Without music, life would be a blank to me.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”
― Jane Austen

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“To be humble is to be so sure of one’s self and one’s mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one’s self and status.”
― Cornel West, Race Matters

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
― Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“He shook hands with Margaret. He knew it was the first time their hands had met, though she was perfectly unconscious of the fact.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“I choose to believe that I owe my very
life to you--ay--smile, and think it an exaggeration if you will.
I believe it, because it adds a value to that life to think--oh,
Miss Hale!' continued he, lowering his voice to such a tender
intensity of passion that she shivered and trembled before him,
'to think circumstance so wrought, that whenever I exult in
existence henceforward, I may say to myself, "All this gladness
in life, all honest pride in doing my work in the world, all this
keen sense of being, I owe to her!" And it doubles the gladness,
it makes the pride glow, it sharpens the sense of existence till
I hardly know if it is pain or pleasure, to think that I owe it
to one--nay, you must, you shall hear'--said he, stepping
forwards with stern determination--'to one whom I love, as I do
not believe man ever loved woman before.' He held her hand tight
in his. He panted as he listened for what should come. ”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is, even at the worst time of all, when I had no hope of ever calling her mine.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time; but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him, seemed to thrill him through and through,—to melt away every resolution, all power of self-control, as if it were wax before a fire.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“He knew how she would love. He had not loved her without gaining that instinctive knowledge of what capabilities were in her. Her soul would walk in glorious sunlight if any man was worthy, by his power of loving, to win back her love.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“It seemed as though he gave way all at once; he was so languid that he could not control his thoughts; they would wander to her; they would bring back the scene,- not of his repulse and rejection the day before but the looks, the actions of the day before that. He went along the crowded streets mechanically, winding in and out among the people, but never seeing them, -almost sick with longing for that one half-hour-that one brief space of time when she clung to him, and her heart beat against his-to come once again.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“I value my own
independence so highly that I can fancy no degradation greater than that
of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing
me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might
be the wisest of men, or the most powerful--I should equally rebel and
resent his interference...”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“If I had but two loaves of bread, I would sell one and buy hyacinths, for they would feed my soul.”
― Mohammad

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
― Stephen McCranie

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.”
― Robert Heinlein