Jenny (Reading Envy) > Jenny (Reading Envy)'s Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons”
― Adrienne Rich

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Chance encounters are what keep us going.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”
― Virginia Woolf

“...life's big. If you can't fix it, give it a spin.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions

“Oh, please. Everyone in this town always says that, like you have to be born here to understand things. I understand plenty. You're only as weird as you want to be.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.
He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“The question for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“The old love was slowly metamorphosed into admiration, just as his physical longing for her (so bitter at first) turned into a consuming and depersonalized tenderness which fed upon her absence instead of dying from it.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive

“How do you spell love in Alexandria?' he said at last, softly. 'That is the question. Sleeplessness, loneliness, bonheur, chagrin -- I do not want to harm or annoy her, but I feel that somehow, somewhere, she must need me as I need her.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive

“When you are in love you know that love is a beggar, shameless as a beggar; and the responses of merely human pity can console one where love is absent by a false travesty of an imagined happiness.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive

“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“That day, I came to a stark realization. I was afraid of men, and the harder I fought, the more intense the fear became. I can't think of an experience that is more harrowing than a woman being sexually harassed or assaulted by a man.”
― Zahra Hankir, Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World

“It's because I'm tired of being branded a terrorist; tired that a human life lost in my country is no loss at all.”
― Hannah Allam, Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World

“Those sorts of stories accumulated until they formed an archetype: the tragic yet resilient Iraqi woman, a metaphor for the country itself. In hindsight, it seems so facile to see Iraqi women only through the prism of their war-ravaged lives, but how else do you report a story where pain is etched on the face of every woman you interview?”
― Zahra Hankir, Our Women on the Ground: Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World

“The battles over women's bodies can be won only by a revolution of the mind”
― Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

“Being a woman anywhere is dangerous.”
― Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

“The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.”
― Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution