Grace > Grace's Quotes

“Beware the things of this world that can mean everything or nothing.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“When you lose someone, they take a bigger place in your heart, not a smaller one. Every day it grows, because you don't stop loving them. You wish you could talk to them. You need their advice. But life doesn't always give us what we need, and it's difficult.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“Life, Enza decided, is not about what you get, but what is taken from you. It's in the things we lose that we discover what we most treasure.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“A practical girl never pines; she takes action.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“For a woman, love is the highest dream, and if a man promises to build a ladder tall enough to reach it, she believes him, hikes up her skirt, and follows him to the stars.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“Mama always said a good family has one heartbeat. No one knows you like the people you live with, and no one will take up your cause to the outside world quite like your blood relatives.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who want to know the facts, and those who want to make up a nice story to feel better. I wish I was the kind who made up stories.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“He loved his family and he loved beauty. For a true Italian, those are the only two things that matter, because in the end that's what sustains you. Your family gathers around you and shores you up while the beauty uplifts you.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“You must pray.'
'No, Sister.' Ciro smiled weakly. 'I'm not a good Catholic.'
'Well, Ciro, you're a good man, and that's more important.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“Ciro took Enza's face in his hands. "I have loved you all of my life. I was a boy who knew nothing, but when I met you, somehow I understood everything”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“If you truly love someone, when he is cut, you bleed.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“I think it’s important to be able to make something, whether it’s shoes or sausage. Food, clothing, and shelter are the basic needs of all people. If you master a trade that serves one of those needs, you will work for a lifetime.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“You just do your best, and life will follow.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“There is no worse feeling than being unable to assuage the suffering of the innocent.”
― Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh - I really think that requires spirit.
It's the kind of character that I am going to develop. I am going to pretend that all life is just a game which I must play as skillfully and fairly as I can. If I lose, I am going to shrug my shoulders and laugh - also if I win.”
― Jean Webster, Daddy Long Legs

“I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not.”
― Jean Webster

“He and I always think the same things are funny, and that is such a lot; it's dreadful when two people's senses of humor are antagonistic. I don't believe there's any bridging that gulf!
And he is--Oh, well! He is just himself, and I miss him, and miss him, and miss him. The whole world seems empty and aching. I hate the moonlight because it's beautiful and he isn't here to see
it with me. But maybe you've loved somebody, too, and you know? If you have, I don't need to explain; if you haven't, I can't explain.”
― Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs

“Thank heaven I don't inherit God from anybody! I am free to make mine up as I wish Him. He's kind and sympathetic and imaginative and forgiving and understanding - and He has a sense of humor.”
― Jean Webster

“The more I study men, the more I realize that they are nothing in the world but boys grown too big to be spankable.”
― Jean Webster, Dear Enemy

“... in spite of being happier than I ever dreamed I could be, I'm also soberer. The fear that something may happen to you rests like a shadow on my heart. Always before I could be frivolous and carefree and unconcerned, because I had nothing precious to lose. But now -- I shall have a Great Big Worry all the rest of my life. Whenever you are away from me I shall be thinking of all the automobiles that can run over you, or the signboards that can fall on your head or the dreadful, squirmy germs that you may be swallowing.”
― Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs

“Please be thinking about me. I'm quite lonely and I want to be thought about”
― Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs

“I don't pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you'd imagine. I'm interested in other people's experiences and inconsistencies, and, though I can't explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit.”
― Louisa Alcott, Little Women

“I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion's tail hidden in his words. He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart? ”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“We are ever striving after what is forbidden, and coveting what is denied us.”
― Ovid

“Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?”
― George Carlin

“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is”
― W.B. Yeats

“Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods