Anna Louise Kallas > Anna Louise's Quotes

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“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

“There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

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

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“My course is set for an uncharted sea.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”
― Norman Mailer

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

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”
― Stewart O'Nan, The Odds: A Love Story

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.”
― John Guare, Landscape of the Body

“We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“All your life, you will be faced with a choice. You can choose love or hate…I choose love.”
― Johnny Cash

“A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

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

“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”
― Ira Glass

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul