Nancy > Nancy's Quotes

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.”
― Arnost Lustig

“You don't turn your back on your destiny.”
― Trine Villemann, Queen of Deception

“Sometimes I think he wanted it to happen. Maybe he felt alone and unloved and he wanted someone to notice him in the most dramatic way: a rescue. How luxurious it would be, he could have thought, to have your father's powerful hands snatch you from deadly water, pull you up and return you to the shore where your family is waiting for you. Then they would recognize how valuable you are.

You wouldn't be ignored after that.

Every day you would be loved the way you deserve.”
― Adam Davies

“When I kissed Havah at that moment I felt hundreds of windows fly open inside my heart. It made me wish that I had never kissed anyone else.”
― Adam Davies

“Keep passing the open windows.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”
― John Irving, Until I Find You

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Sorrow floats.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”
― John Irving

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

[Remarks on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, 13 March 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then - silence. Afterwards...I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you...I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child...Do you believe that man grows? No, he is born suddenly - a word, a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”
― Ghassan Kanafani

“Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“And are we not all “mere guests” upon this whirling earth?”
― Lee Smith, Guests on Earth

“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

“Il n'est pas nécessaire de vivre.
Il est nécessaire de naviguer.”
― H. Will Bashor, JEAN-BAPTISTE CLERY: Eyewitness to Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette's Nightmare

“At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love―just enough to feed the birds.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour
to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my
world.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The first step to liberty is respecting the rights of others.”
― Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove

“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“The truth is, honey, I've enjoyed my life. I've had a hell of a good time.”
― Ava Gardner

“Just because something is normal in a culture does not make it ethically sound. Normal merely means there is a social consensus that it is held as self-evidently "true", predominantly precluding further critical examination of the matter.”
― Kevin Focke