jillian (jill) B > jillian (jill) B's Quotes

“Therefore, he sat before his dying fire, sorrowful to think upon
the way by which he had come to that night, yet not strewing poison
on the way by which other men had come to it. That he should have
missed so much, and at his time of life should look so far about
him for any staff to bear him company upon his downward journey and
cheer it, was a just regret. He looked at the fire from which the
blaze departed, from which the afterglow subsided, in which the
ashes turned grey, from which they dropped to dust, and thought,
'How soon I too shall pass through such changes, and be gone!'

To review his life was like descending a green tree in fruit and
flower, and seeing all the branches wither and drop off, one by
one, as he came down towards them.

'From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days, through the
rigid and unloving home that followed them, through my departure,
my long exile, my return, my mother's welcome, my intercourse with
her since, down to the afternoon of this day with poor Flora,' said
Arthur Clennam, 'what have I found!'

His door was softly opened, and these spoken words startled him,
and came as if they were an answer:

'Little Dorrit.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“She looked at Will with a direct glance, full of delighted confidence.
"You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here again till I have made myself of some mark in the world?" said Will, trying hard to reconcile the utmost pride with the utmost effort to get an expression of strong feeling from Dorothea.
She was not aware how long it was before she answered. She had turned her head and was looking out of the window on the rose-bushes, which seemed to have in them the summers of all the years when Will would be away.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the maturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“But all this was nothing compared to the face which I regret to say vaguely resembled my own, less the refinement of course, same little abortive moustache, same little ferrety eyes, same paraphimosis of the nose, and a thin red mouth that looked as if it was raw from trying to shit its tongue.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“The best revenge is living well without you. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, ed.

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

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

“Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Some men are like that - they get a woman in their mind, and that's that. They will destroy themselves and everyone else over her; they will let everything else fall apart.”
― Paul Elwork

“But as the years passed, Ned's silence grew and grew. It pressed upon his face and his body. It leaked into the house and spread outward into the yard. His silence had weight. It had substance and presence and teeth.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Witch's Boy

“I may not have been born captain of this boat, but I was born to rock it.”
― Tupelo Hassman, Girlchild

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

“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
― Walker Evans

“I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess -”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“They meet again at dinner--again, next day-- again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly but of place and yet so perfectly at home. They appear to take as little note of one another as any two people enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows--all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“That afternoon, she'd looked across at Storrow, at his proud, immaculate features and depthless gaze, and felt as if this man was every man she'd ever hated. He was Torsten; he was Vasily; he was every brutal narcissist who lived to impress his distortions of reality upon souls weaker than his own- which Storrow had, misguidedly, taken hers to be.”
― Robin Kirman, Bradstreet Gate

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch