Donna > Donna's Quotes

“Gay people don’t actually try to convert people. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Pam's father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. It didn't surprise me. Put a bunch of white assholes together and you're going to find that going around.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“You are constantly invited to be what you are.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”
― Descartes

“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable”
― May Sarton

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.”
― Dorothy Parker

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

“Change isn't easy... changing the way you live means changing what you believe about life. That's hard... When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.”
― Dean Koontz

“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

“To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”
― David Sedaris

“Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.”
― Jodie Foster

“He counted his steps. That was how you got through tough things. You counted. Once you said, "one," then you knew "two" was coming, and "three" right after that.”
― James Rollins, The Blood Gospel

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”
― Louis Adamic

“Books have always been my escape - where I go to bury my nose, hone my senses, or play the emotional tourist in a world of my own choosing... Words are my best expressive tool, my favorite shield, my point of entry...When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter. If I could choose my favorite day, my favorite moment in some perfect dreamscape, I know exactly where I would be: stretched out in bed in the afternoon, knowing that the kids are taking a nap and I've got two more chapters left of some heartbreaking novel, the kind that messes you up for a week.”
― Jodie Foster

“Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.”
― Francois-Marie De Voltaire

“how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet”
― Robert Browning

“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Choice

“If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”
― Abraham Sutzkever