Sanjana (The Book Station) > Sanjana's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“It was but yesterday I thought myself a fragment quivering without rhythm in the sphere of life. Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me.”
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“When in doubt, go to the library.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
― Voltaire

“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham - all a sham, James, and it won't stand when things come to be turned inside out and put down for what they”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“Do you know why this world is as bad as it is?... It is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light... My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“If you in the morning
Throw minutes away,
You can't pick them up
In the course of a day.
You may hurry and scurry,
And flurry and worry,
You've lost them forever,
Forever and aye.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“One can forgive but one should never forget.”
― Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”
― Tara Westover, Educated