Danielle > Danielle's Quotes

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”
― Graham Greene

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”
― Graham Greene

“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― Mary Oliver

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.”
― Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself. When one begins to love, one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in arranging for tomorrow's rendezvous.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that you do not have value. Jealousy scans for evidence to prove the point - that others will be preferred and rewarded more than you. There is only one alternative - self-value. If you cannot love yourself, you will not believe that you are loved. You will always think it's a mistake or luck. Take your eyes off others and turn the scanner within. Find the seeds of your jealousy, clear the old voices and experiences. Put all the energy into building your personal and emotional security. Then you will be the one others envy, and you can remember the pain and reach out to them. ”
― Jennifer James

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See