Chloe > Chloe's Quotes

“Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch your eyes, but to wonder: What if? What if? And in that question, there is a longing, too much like the longing of a young girl in love. The sickness occupies your every thought, breath like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill.
Nothing will ever be so close to you again. You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you.
Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.”
― August Strindberg, Miss Julie

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.”
― Judy Blume

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them...to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don’t ask quarters.”
― Horton Foote

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, but only saps today of its strength.”
― A.J. Cronin

“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”
― Janet Frame

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
― Chris Abani

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Elizabeth Appell

“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
― Anna Quindlen

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way.”
― Walter Tevis

“I am different, not less.”
― Temple Grandin

“I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”
― Edith Sitwell

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner