Pat > Pat's Quotes

“If you're going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston Churchill

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“If at eighty you're not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin' and keepin' power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on your way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss - under your breath, of course - "Fuck you, Jack! you don't own me." If you can whistle up your ass, if you can be turned on by a fetching bottom or a lovely pair of teats, if you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from going sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.”
― Henry Miller, Sextet: Six essays

“The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it. You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. Crying gives me a headache.”
― Marjorie Pay Hinckley

“Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”
― Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky and Other Poems

“Your thorns are the best part of you.”
― Marianne Moore

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street”
― W.H. Auden

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard.”
― Kate Atkinson

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”
― Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense

“There is a sacredness in tears....They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”
― Washington Irving

“Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks.”
― Jess Kidd, Himself

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”
― George Saunders

“A big, sandy-haired man held his daughter on his shoulders, showing her the Statue of Liberty. I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me. And the American flag was flying from the top of the ship, above my head. I had seen the French flag drive the French into the most unspeakable frenzies, I had seen the flag which was nominally mine used to dignify the vilest purposes: now I would never, as long as I lived, know what other saw when they saw a flag.”
― James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man

“Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“There was so much to do she couldn’t even make a to-do list because making a list was just one more thing to do. Plus, she still had all of her other”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“People do not change, they are merely revealed.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Most nightmares are caged in their realm by implausibilities. The sleeper slogs through quicksand in a fun house of frightening nonsense and disjointed mumbo jumbo. But everything’s all better once the bedside lamp is back on, because reality, even when it’s bad, is easily distinguished from night terror. Except for the trying-to-scream dream. That one’s pretty much spot-on.”
― Jamie Mason