Ann > Ann's Quotes

“HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug: Heaven knows they need it.”
― Princess Diana of Wales

“if you love two people at the same time, choose the second. Because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second.”
― Johnny Depp

“A man who spends his time pokin' his ....... nose into other's sinfulness has nay time to tend his own.”
― Diana Gabaldon

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Friendship that insists upon agreement on all matters is not worth the name. Friendship to be real must ever sustain the weight of honest differences, however sharp they be.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Wonder shows in the light of our eyes. Without it, they become dull and old.”
― Goldie Hawn, A Lotus Grows in the Mud

“It is the simplest things in life that hold the most wonder; the color of the sea, the sand between your toes, the laughter of a child.”
― Goldie Hawn, A Lotus Grows in the Mud

“A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice.”
― William Cosby

“Knowing your limits, and that there is a limit to getting what you want, comes from a sense of self-respect instilled in you from an early age. It takes guts to stand up in the face of what you really want, but you have to know in your heart that if you make the wrong choice you won't be able to live with yourself for the rest of your life. There is only one person who matters at that point and that's YOU. If you give in to such pressures, you strip away your self-respect, your personal ethics and your standards - the very things that create the fiber that will hold you together for the rest of your life.”
― Goldie Hawn

“Letting go of someone we love is the hardest thing we will ever do. Some people never surrender to love for the fear of being hurt. But to not have loved, to not have felt the immense joy it brings, would have been a far worse kind of death.”
― Goldie Hawn

“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“In the beginning there was faith-which is childish; trust-which is vain; and illusion-which is dangerous.
We believed in God; trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekhinah's flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and in his soul a reflection of God's image.
THAT was the source if not the cause of all our ordeals.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Sometimes I am asked if I know the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude HAS a response. What I do know is that there is response in responsibility. When we speak of this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant, responsibility is the key word,
The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

“We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death?”
― Elie Wiesel

“Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill; some sort of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

“No one is Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn't know it. We didn't know that a man called Adolf Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that wold crown his career; or that all the necessary means for "dealing with" us were already at hand in a place called Birkenau.”
― Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea

“If I had spoken to him out loud, he would have understood the tragic fate of those who came back, left over, living dead. You must look at them carefully. Their appearance is deceptive. They are smugglers. They look like the others. They eat, they laugh, they love. The seek money, fame, love. Like the other. But it isn't true; they are playing, sometimes without even knowing it. Anyone who has seen what THEY have seen cannot be like the others, cannot laugh, love, pray, bargain, suffer, have fun, or forget. Like the others. You have to watch them carefully when they pass by an innocent-looking smokestack, or when they lift a piece of bread to their mouths. Something in them shudders and makes you turn your eyes away. These people have been amputated; they haven't lost their legs or eyes, but their will and their taste for life. The things they have seen will come to the surface again sooner or later. And then the world will be frightened and won't dare look these spiritual cripples in the eye.”
― Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea

“I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. "I am young", he said, "and stronger than he." He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating”
― Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea

“Be careful in your relations with those in power; they draw you close or allow you to approach them only when they need you. They are your friends when your friendship is useful to them and affords them pleasure, but they forget you when you are in trouble.

Elie Wiesel quoting Rabban Gamliel”
― Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea

“Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough.

*Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust”
― Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea

“What is the difference between Jew and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?”
― Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea

“We may not have computers or telephones or television, but we have books and conversations. And we talk to each other in person, not through e-mails and texts.”
― Nancy Grossman, A World Away

“I am reminded of the query made about man's inhumanity to man in the concentration camps. The question was asked: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?

And the answer came: Where was man?

For it was men alone who did this evil. Not God or religion or men acting in the name of God or religion. But simply men.”
― Glenn Meade, The Last Witness

“Our beliefs can move us forward in life - or they can hold us back.”
― Oprah Winfrey, What I Know for Sure

“We should no longer allow a mother to be defined as "just a mom". It is on her back that great nations are built. We should no longer allow any woman's voice to be drowned out or disregarded. As we affirm other women, and as we teach our sons, husbands and friends to hold them in the highest regard, we honor both the mothers whose shoulders we've stood on and the daughters who will one day stand tall on ours.”
― Oprah Winfrey, What I Know for Sure

“When the universe compels me toward the best path to take, it never leaves me with "maybe," "should I," or even "perhaps." I always know for sure when it's telling me to proceed - because everything inside me rises up to reverberate "YES!”
― Oprah Winfrey, What I Know for Sure