Crystal > Crystal's Quotes

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“She'd made those choices out of fear, and she wasn't afraid anymore. From now on, if something was important to her, she would demand it. Because the truth was that she belonged anywhere she wanted to be, and she was beautiful just for being brave.”
― Victoria Helen Stone, Evelyn, After

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“If you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you'll end up miserable.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“People don't have to do things by half measures because they aren't getting paid for it. In fact, that's all the more reason to throw every ounce of passion you have behind it.”
― Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody

“There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“I am slowly learning to pluck the flowers of my past from the weeds, and place them in the window where I can see them first. ~Call Me Tuesday”
― Leigh Byrne

“Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.”
― Tana French, The Witch Elm

“One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil - rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“Allow yourself to sink deeply into the here and the now, because life is possible only in the present, life is available only in the present moment, and you know that you have the capacity to touch life in the present moment, in the here and the now.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“All life is a passing show. If we want to hold it, even for a minute, we feel tension. Nature will try to run away; we will try to pull it back and keep it. When we want to keep it, we put up barriers which ultimately cause us pain.”
― Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali

“Never, never settle for these little things. Our goal is something very high. It is eternal peace, eternal joy. Don't settle for a little peace, for a little joy, for petty happiness.”
― Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali

“Your true Self, which is your spirit, your soul, is completely free of those things. It is immune to criticism, it is unfearful of any challenge, and it feels beneath no one. And yet, it is also humble and feels superior to no one, because it recognizes that everyone else is the same Self, the same spirit in different disguises.”
― Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams

“You never know where the trapdoors are in your life, do you?”
― Stephen King, Fairy Tale

“One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“And if one is never lost in life, then clearly one has never traveled anywhere interesting.”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

“part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Librarianist

“You could rattle the stars.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass

“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
― John F. Kennedy

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“If the story of your life were a book, I’d carry it with me across the world. I’d read it every night. And whenever I reached the ending of what had been shared with me, I’d open it to the first page and begin reading it again.”
― Danielle L. Jensen, Gilded Serpent

“You know the word mingyun, right? Your personal destiny in this life? Think about the two characters that make up the word. Ming is the inherent nature of your life as given to you by the gods. It's a destiny that can't be changed, the way the innate characteristics you are born with can't be changed. But what is yun? Yun is where flexibility comes in. Yun is fortune that changes with the seasons of the universe but can also turn depending on the actions you take, the choices you make. Together ming and yun make up a river, one that wants to carry you to a particular destination but moves fluidly, possibly diverging if a tree falls along its path or a large rainfall swells its banks. You, too, can change the path of the river; you can even swim upstream if you want to. Just expect it will be tiring, not as easy as moving with the current.”
― Karissa Chen, Homeseeking

“Sometimes it can feel like disloyalty, letting go of past versions of yourself.”
― Ava Robinson

“Isn't it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won't be a tragedy when we don't exist anymore! It's just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends