Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“If you can’t be unafraid, Henry said, be afraid and happy.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“When the sharks the sharks devour
Little fishes have their hour.”
― Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“However many nations live in the world today, however many countless people, they all had but one dawn.”
― Anonymous, The Popol Vuh

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Sometimes—there's God—so quickly!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“My God died young. Theolatry i found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs God; but was I free?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Oh, Strange! It's always strange the heart is: only it's the skin we ever know.”
― Archibald MacLeish, J.B.: A Play in Verse

“You wanted justice and there was none- only love.”
― Archibald MacLeish

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Teenagers are fast. They’re like cockroaches that way.”
― Stephen King, Finders Keepers

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“We are always in a hurry to be happy...; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I have seen Russians devour, without being visibly inconvenienced, vegetable substances which would infallibly have killed a Neapolitan or an Arab.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
― Nikolai V. Gogol

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King