Emily > Emily's Quotes

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
― John Green

“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”
― A.A. Milne

“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”
― Charles Lamb, The life, letters and writings of Charles Lamb Volume 3

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.”
― Galileo Galilei

“Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.”
― George Sand

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.”
― Lois Lowry

“One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.”
― J.K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
― John Lennon

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”
― John Green

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.”
― Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.”
― Machiavelli Niccolo, The Prince

“A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.”
― Machiavelli Niccolo, The Prince

“How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The venn diagram of boys who don't like smart girls and boys you don't want to date is a circle.”
― John Green

“Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
― Charles Chaplin

“That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”
― Stephen King, The Stand