Kendra > Kendra's Quotes

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“Overhead the sky was melting, the cracked cream color rubbing off in cogs of brine.
The fields far ahead of me in endless pudding, studded here and there with what had been: homes and houses, hair and heirlooms, habits, hallways, hauntings, hope.”
― Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas

“I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“We'll never be as young as we are tonight.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“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

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself”
― Henry Miller

“Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.”
― Henry Miller

“We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.”
― Henry Miller

“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“To conform is to lose your soul”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I am. I think. I will.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog