Donna Crupi > Donna's Quotes

“When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“If you act out of love, whatever you do is both perfect and right. It doesn't matter if you're a deep thinker or a squirrel nut if you act out of love. Crap starts getting seriously screwed if something else gets in the way, something like fear or revenge or even victory or being famous or some other dumb thing. The only thing we need to do is figure out what we really love.”
― Geoff Herbach, Nothing Special

“It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Elizabeth Appell

“Between the shadows of the earth and the dark depths of the sky, human life lay slumbering, with all its unsolved puzzles.”
― Theodor Storm, Immensee

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”
― Ayn Rand

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Which is the true nightmare, the horrific dream that you have in your sleep or the dissatisfied reality that awaits you when you awake?”
― Justin Alcala

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

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft