Mel > Mel's Quotes

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“So few want to be rebels anymore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“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

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

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

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”
― Nora Ephron

“When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“How? I am a demon and a nightmare; I die every spring, and I will live forever.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“And if you couldn't be loved, the next best thing was to be let alone.”
― L.M. Montgomery

“The best things in life aren't things.”
― Art Buchwald

“There is no such thing as a "broken family." Family is family, and is not determined by marriage certificates, divorce papers, and adoption documents. Families are made in the heart. The only time family becomes null is when those ties in the heart are cut. If you cut those ties, those people are not your family. If you make those ties, those people are your family. And if you hate those ties, those people will still be your family because whatever you hate will always be with you.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Asking “why” only makes us feel hopeless. Asking “how” points the way forward, and shows us what we must do.”
― Sue Klebold, A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy