Hillary Read > Hillary's Quotes

“Will you have her? She is herself a dowry.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Information wants to be free.”
― Stewart Brand

“Animal smell is beyond philosophy.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“You always admire what you really don't understand.”
― Blaise Pascal

“If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.  ”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.”
― Francois La Rochefoucauld

“Occasionally she goes "Mmm" at some line the same way my grandma does during a sermon. Poetry's Mrs. Murray's religion.”
― Angie Thomas, On the Come Up

“Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.”
― Erwin Schrödinger

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“It's natural, as our loved ones age, to start grieving their loss. Even before we lose them.”
― Steven Rowley, Lily and the Octopus

“Although it is very easy to marry a wife, it is very difficult to support her along with the children and the household. Accordingly, no one notices this faith of Jacob. Indeed, many hate fertility in a wife for the sole reason that the offspring must be supported and brought up. For this is what they commonly say: ‘Why should I marry a wife when I am a pauper and a beggar? I would rather bear the burden of poverty alone and not load myself with misery and want.’ But this blame is unjustly fastened on marriage and fruitfulness. Indeed, you are indicting your unbelief by distrusting God’s goodness, and you are bringing greater misery upon yourself by disparaging God’s blessing. For if you had trust in God’s grace and promises, you would undoubtedly be supported. But because you do not hope in the Lord, you will never prosper.”
― Martin Luther, The Sermons Of Martin Luther

“Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don’t have to explain why we find a particular joke so funny; we have the same people; we both want to try that rather specialised sexual scenario.
It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers’ capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were – and we could do no better. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: "It is a subject on which nothing final can be known." The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”
― sylvia plath, The Bell Jar

“An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

“We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it and to deprogram it.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Because I say so little you think I don't feel. I care a lot.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice