Karen > Karen's Quotes

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending...
But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.”
― Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin

“Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.”
― Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin

“For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.”
― Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin

“Dude, with your voice you are like, 'Look at all these books I've read,' but with your eyes you are like, 'Help me.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“Hold tight to the world and do not let go and do not fuck this up.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“There is no going back in life, no return, no second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world...all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate--call it what you will--happened to be me.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“You can't have too much dog in a book.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“When you're struggling hard to manage your own emotions, it becomes unbearable to have to witness other people's, to have to try and manage theirs too.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away. At least I know what love looks like, I told myself. That's something. No one had ever looked at me like that, but I'd be able to recognize it if they ever did.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“He smiled. 'Now I have you in a cage.And whenever I want you,I'll take you out, and when I've done with you, I'll set you back in.”
― Judith Rossner, Emmeline

“The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”
― Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“She had learnt to wait for the changes and the help that life brings. Life is like the sea, sometimes you are in the trough of the wave, sometimes on the crest. When you are in the trough, you wait for the crest, and always, trough or crest, a mysterious tide bears you forward to an unseen, but certain shore. In”
― Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance

“The smell of coffee, white dust, tobacco and burnt bread, flowers with a fragrance of wine, and the crimson fruit, soft and overripe. A girl looking over her bare shoulder, with a flash of a smile, gold ear-rings showing from thick black hair brushed away from her face, long arms, a cigarette between her lips. Night like a great dark blanket, voices murmuring at a street corner, the air warm with tired flowers, and a hum from the sea.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“They were all gone, these other selves, and they would never come back again.They had vanished, like little thoughts and little dreams, poor has-beens that had lived in me and I in them, now thrown away into the dust, not even lingering as shadows to keep me company.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“My plans for today are to hang about hoping for a glimpse of her, to have my heart eaten away by the thought of her; to feel my blood bounding maddeningly, ridiculously, like a young boy's; to despair; to realise the weight of my misery and hunger with each step I take.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”
― Horace Mann

“It matters to ourselves, of course, but it matters terribly to other people. Moral failure or spiritual failure or whatever you call it, makes such a vicious circle... It seems as if when we love people and they fall short, we retaliate by falling shorter ourselves. Children are like that. Adults have a fearful responsibility. When they fail to live up to what children expect of them, the children give up themselves. So each generation keeps failing the next.”
― Dorothy Whipple, They Were Sisters

“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

“Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables