Joy > Joy's Quotes

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Foretelling

“Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Last Letter from Your Lover

“When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“You're better than seven years of food. You're better than windows. You're even better than the sky.”
― Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
― Elizabeth Warren

“We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.”
― Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

“Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Life is too short to read a bad book.”
― James Joyce

“There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“When you get tired of worrying and mourning your horse and trying not to be afraid, tell me and I'll do it for you a while so you can shut your eyes and sleep peaceful.”
― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

“But in a country where you hang your dead up on walls and pride whether or not a man bears a javelin more than his character, how am I to persuade you out of a war? It would be suicide for Kildenree to war on Bayern and butchery for Bayern to attack Kildenree. If you don't believe me, then send me back. Or if you don't trust me to leave, I'll return to my little room on the west wall and tend your geese, and you can be sure that on my watch no thieves will touch my flock.”
― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

“Oh, but I like my geese. Like cats, they can't be told what to do, and like dogs, they're loyal, and like people, they talk every chance they get.”
― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

“Geric," she called.
He turned back around.
"What kind of flowers were they?"
"I don't rightly know," he said. He made faltering gestures with his hands, forming their size and shape from the air. "They were yellow, and smallish, and had lots of petals."
"Thank you," she said. "They were beautiful.”
― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl