Chris Park > Chris's Quotes

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough”
― Walt Whitman

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, "Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.”
― J.M. Coetzee

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of–” I hesitated.

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson