Melissa > Melissa's Quotes

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“We are always the same age inside. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“¿Quién ha dicho que sólo pueden hacernos sufrir los malvados?”
― Ernesto Sabato, Sobre héroes y tumbas

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected Poems

“So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.”
― Amara Lakhous, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Siempre estaré del lado de aquellos que no tienen nada y que ni siquiera pueden disfrutar de nada de lo que tienen en paz.”
― Federico García Lorca

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”
― George Orwell, 1984