Samantha > Samantha's Quotes

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Here Be Dragons

“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
― Thomas Merton , No Man Is an Island

“This paper will serve instead of a confidential friend into whose ear I might pour forth the overflowings of my heart. It will not sympathize with my distresses, but then, it will not laugh at them, and, if I keep it close, it cannot tell again; so it is, perhaps, the best friend I could have for the purpose.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by”
― Alison Weir, Innocent Traitor

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
― Emily Jane Brontë , Wuthering Heights

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay

“If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that—warm things, kind things, sweet things—help and comfort and laughter—and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
― Sid Ziff

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“It must be admitted that such things were common coin of the period. Kingdoms were often handed over to adolescents, whose absolute power fasinated them as might a game. Hardly grown out of the age in which it is fun to tear the wings from flies, they might now amuse themselves by tearing the heads from men. Too young to fear or even imagine death, they would not hesitate to distribute it around them.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“You see, but you do not observe.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia

“There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.”
― Irwin Shaw

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
― Roald Dahl

“If I knocked and waited at every door, who knows what I might miss?”
― C.J. Sansom, Dissolution

“But if we never acted except when we were certain our motives were pure, we would never act at all.”
― C J Sansom

“Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane