Erika Bonaparte > Erika's Quotes

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”
― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

“The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.”
― Robert Bloch

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“We loved with a love that was more than love.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant

“Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.”
― Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected Poems

“There is a sacredness in tears....They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”
― Washington Irving

“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
― Edward Gorey

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
― Rumi

“Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

“No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.”
― Elizabeth Peters

“Marriage, in my view, should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Mummy Case

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“You're something between a dream and a miracle.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“We never know the quality of someone else's life, though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgement.”
― Tami Hoag, Dark Horse

“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.”
― June Jordan

“If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.”
― June Jordan

“I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me”
― June Jordan

“and if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

(from i must become a menace to my enemies)”
― June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

“When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives”
― June Jordan, Passion

“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”
― June Jordan

“I am the history of the rejection of who I am”
― June Jordan

“To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.”
― June Jordan