Audrey > Audrey's Quotes

“Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
― Edith Sitwell

“Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.”
― Glen Cook, Sweet Silver Blues

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains

“What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.”
― Irwin Shaw

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

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“There was a point beyond which the trappings of conventional life became hard to assume, and Ames had passed that point.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“To feel, as you fumbled for another nickel, that something big might have happened since you last looked. In this way, you fought off the anxious emptiness at the center of your head, the sense that nothing under the sun was ever really new, and that we were all of us therefore stuck with the lives we had.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience