Bridget Reutter > Bridget's Quotes

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Sometimes I feel like I’m actually on the wrong planet. It’s great when I’m in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?”
― George Harrison

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”
― alice walker, The Color Purple

“Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.”
― Alice Walker, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way...I can't apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to... We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful...We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Look closely at the present you are constructing:
it should look like the future you are dreaming.”
― Alice Walker

“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry.”
― Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

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

“A cup of tea would restore my normality."

[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Screenplay]”
― Douglas Adams

“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.”
― Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth”
― Albert Camus

“When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen