Brooklyn > Brooklyn's Quotes

“Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.”
― Maya Angelou

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

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

“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered you will never grow.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen.”
― W.P. Kinsella

“One day you will wake up and there won't be any more time to do the things you've always wanted. Do it now.”
― Paulo Coelho

“That we have separate and distinct mechanisms for appreciating the structural and the emotional aspects of music is brought home by the wide variety of responses (and even “dissociations”) that people have to music.146 There are many of us who lack some of the perceptual or cognitive abilities to appreciate music but nonetheless enjoy it hugely, and enthusiastically bawl out tunes, sometimes shockingly off-key, in a way that gives us great happiness (though it may make others squirm). There are others with an opposite balance: they may have a good ear, be finely sensitive to the formal nuances of music, but nevertheless do not care for it greatly or consider it a significant part of their lives. That one may be quite “musical” and yet almost indifferent to music, or almost tone-deaf yet passionately sensitive to music, is quite striking. While”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

“Like the Freemasons, the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile. As”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.”
― Alice Munro, Dear Life

“And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting. I”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy 2

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.”
― Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“In fact, so far as ‘love’ was concerned, I had been living for some years past in a rather makeshift manner. This was not because I felt the matter to be of little interest, like a man who hardly cares what he eats provided hunger is satisfied, or one prepared to discuss painting, should the subject arise, though never tempted to enter a picture gallery. On the contrary, my interest in love was keen enough, but the thing itself seemed not particularly simple to come by.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. My own existence seemed infinitely stagnant, relieved only by work on another book. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“The passages seemed catacombs of a hell assigned to the subdued regret of those who had lacked in life the income to which they felt themselves entitled; this suspicion that the two houses were an abode of the dead being increased by the fact that no one was ever to be seen about, even at the reception desk.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“Pictures, apart from their æsthetic interest, can achieve the mysterious fascination of those enigmatic scrawls on walls, the expression of Heaven knows what psychological urge on the part of the executant;”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—”
― Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

“What is the opposite of a perfect storm? That is what this was, one of those rare moments when the world seems to shed all shyness and display every possible permutation of beauty. Oliver said it well as we took up our plates and began heading back downstairs: “I’m glad I’m not dead.” This came out rather loudly, as he is a bit deaf. Even so, he looked surprised by his own utterance, as if it were something he was feeling but didn’t really mean to say aloud—a thought turned into an exclamation. “I’m glad you’re not dead, too,” said a neighbor gaily, taking up the refrain. “I’m glad we’re all not dead,” said another. There followed a spontaneous raising of glasses on the rooftop, a toast to the setting sun, a toast to us.”
― Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

“everything. It requires a certain kind of unconditional love to love living here. But New York repays you in time in memorable encounters, at the very least. Just remember: Ask first, don’t grab, be fair, say please and thank you, always say thank you—even if you don’t get something back right away. You will.”
― Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me