Faye Lewis > Faye's Quotes

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“To die, - To sleep, - To sleep!
Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“What happens in the heart, simply happens”
― Ted Hughes

“Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …’ I’m drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End Of Mr. Y

“These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.”
― Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

“A human is a real bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small water-logged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind. No longer”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Pre-internet, it’s how I learned, and it learned me good. I know deep wisdoms, such as, ‘If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while – their wife might catch fire.’ (Jane Eyre)”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected. That”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“Everyone had an idea as to how to save Germany. However, none of these proposals had anything to do with Germany. Rather, they were tied to personal interests. An”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“The First Day of Summer according to the Old Icelandic Calendar is observed on a Thursday from April 19-25 in any given year. The old calendar had only two seasons, winter and summer. The”
― Alda Sigmundsdóttir, Icelandic Folk Legends: Tales of apparitions, outlaws and things unseen

“That’s what family stories were—amusing accounts of the messes and the fuckups. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.”
― Nick Hornby, Everyone's Reading Bastard

“Below him, his city spread in soft mounds and hollows, like a duvet dropped into a well. The breeze and the elevation made”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“So many other boys and girls grew up with holes in their chests gaping as wide as the Christian fissure that had spat them into the world.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“With their big hit, PiL had reached a whole new generation of fans, and the gig had sold out very fast. But right down at the front were a crowd of about three to four hundred hardcore, old-school punks who had come creeping out of the squats of Camden and Shepherd’s Bush to greet their hero. To”
― Simon Parkes, Live At the Brixton Academy: A riotous life in the music business

“The feeling that your daughter is a deviant already and will only get worse. In a flash, you can see her as a feral adolescent, as a dirty-bomb teenager, a burst of invisible and spreading fury. Where is she now? She’s fled, not to her room but somewhere else, a closet, she always hides somewhere disturbing, a place befitting a German fairy tale. Believe”
― Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier

“Caught baffled by the perplexing slow-release of sadness for ever and ever and ever. Which”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“The number of Homo sapiens sapiens that have ever lived, fought, loved, fussed pottered and finally died over the last 100,000 years is around ninety billion.”
― John Lloyd, QI: The Book of the Dead

“everyone alive on the planet today is related both to Confucius (551–479 BC) and to Nefertiti (1370–1330 BC). So”
― John Lloyd, QI: The Book of the Dead

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Over the last seventy years humankind has broken not only the Law of the Jungle, but also the Chekhov Law. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“This is all the fault of evolution. For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness. The”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“decades. Why are revolutions so rare? Why do the masses sometimes clap and cheer for centuries on end, doing everything the man on the balcony commands them, even though they could in theory charge forward at any moment and tear him to pieces? Ceaus¸escu and his cronies dominated 20 million Romanians for four decades because they ensured three vital conditions. First, they placed loyal communist apparatchiks in control of all networks of cooperation, such as the army, trade unions and even sports associations. Second, they prevented the creation of any rival organisations – whether political, economic or social – which might serve as a basis for anti-communist cooperation. Third, they relied on the support of sister communist parties in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Despite occasional tensions, these parties helped each other in times of need, or at least guaranteed that no outsider poked his nose into the socialist paradise. Under such conditions, despite all the hardship and suffering inflicted on them by the ruling elite, the 20 million Romanians were unable to organise any effective opposition.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow