Madeline W > Madeline's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
― Amelia Earhart

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Let me listen to me and not to them.”
― Gertrude Stein

“The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”
― Cornelius Tacitus, Annals

“Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-chek?”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”
― David Bowie

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
― Epicurus

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“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

“Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Serve It Forth

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928