michelle > michelle's Quotes

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“In my food world, there is no fear or guilt, only joy and balance. So no ingredient is ever off-limits. Rather, all of the recipes here follow my Usually-Sometimes-Rarely philosophy. Notice there is no Never.”
― Ellie Krieger, The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life

“Just like in bodybuilding, failure is also a necessary experience for growth in our own lives, for if we're never tested to our limits, how will we know how strong we really are? How will we ever grow? ”
― Arnold Schwarzenegger

“And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.”
― Markus Zusak

“Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“And here, after all that, is what I have come to believe about beauty: Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful. It's more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous, than to sit pretty for pictures. A woman's soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else. Beauty comes from the tragedy that each person's life is destined to be lost to time. I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart - and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love. I have trained my eyes to look for beauty, and I've gotten very good at finding it. You can argue and tell me it's not true, but I really don't care what anyone says. I have come, at last, to believe in the title I came up with for the book: Everyone Is Beautiful.”
― Katherine Center, Everyone is Beautiful

“We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.”
― Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home

“You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.”
― Elissa Schappell, Blueprints for Building Better Girls

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. What Mary really runs isn't a bakery, but a community.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Power isn't about doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“It doesn't matter how greatly you've been hurt or how much you're hurting, it's what you do with the pain that counts. You could cry for years or you could choose to learn and grow from it.”
― Chris Colfer, The Wishing Spell

“Once upon a time' These are the most magical words our world has ever known and the gateway to the greatest stories ever told. They're an immediate calling to anyone who hears them-a calling into a world where everyone is welcome and anything can happen. Mice can become men, maids can become princesses, and they can teach valuable lessons in the process.”
― Chris Colfer, The Wishing Spell

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
― Neil Gaiman

“If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.”
― Alan Gratz, Refugee

“All my life, I kept waiting for things to get better. For the bright promise of mañana. But a funny thing happened while I was waiting for the world to change, Chabele: It didn't. Because I didn't change it.”
― Alan Gratz, Refugee

“But most of all, I'll remember how she loved me. I turn away, knowing that I might never get to see Julie Murphy again. But I will know her for the rest of my life.”
― Lynda Mullaly Hunt, One for the Murphys

“Do you know what courage is? It's being afraid and doing it anyway.”
― Lynda Mullaly Hunt, One for the Murphys