Deb > Deb's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

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

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

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
― Mother Teresa

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“By the time the last few notes fade, his hope will be restored, but each time he's force to resort to the Adagio it becomes harder, and he knows its effect is finite. There are only a certain number of Adagios left in him, and he will not recklessly spend this precious currency. ”
― Steven Galloway

“She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it.
Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to under stand that you life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever. ”
― Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

“There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
― Maya Angelou

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”
― Leopold Stokowski

“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
― Robert Frost

“So much universe, and so little time.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.”
― Terry Pratchett

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Mother always said she was a size 7 woman she kept wrapped in fat to prevent bruising.”
― Haven Kimmel

“I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn't have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.”
― Haven Kimmel, A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small In Mooreland, Indiana

“Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

“The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog