Hayley > Hayley's Quotes

“There is something horribly hypocritical about passing judgement on another human beings actions from the comfort and safety of an armchair”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Unsinkable: The Full Story Of The RMS Titanic

“To love women. To pleasure them, to make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To protect them. To respect them. To listen to them. They are life-givers. To live is to love them.”
― Pete Hamill, Forever

“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.”
― Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

“Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.”
― Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

“Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.”
― Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

“I no longer think she's just being nice. She's being kind. Which is much more a sign of character than mere niceness. Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“My mother refuses to go into the ocean. She respects it, she says, which is basically the same as saying she's afraid. I go in because it scares me...”
― Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl

“The sea slapped ominously, confessing its strategic impartiality. The sea is an international sea, and the sky a universal sky. Often we forget that. Often we think that what is verging upon us is ours alone. We forget that there are other sides entirely.”
― Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl

“Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves -- this way those who do succumb to sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. Girls demand a covenant because if one gives in, others will be expected to do the same. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. Or we are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars.”
― Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl

“Little things please little minds.”
― Ken Follett, Fall of Giants

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor close to being in love.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“There's something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It's alive in a way that's greater than any description of it...”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Her eyes showed that though she may have decided to regret him, as long as he was in her presence she could not.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“What could be more lovely than writing a book about something you love?”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“They were already in love and both of them knew it, but for both it was too fast.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“How far do you have to go before you forgive yourself for how you were born?”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“But, Catherine, everything's that true despite us - the things they're talking about, natural laws - will always remain true despite us. What matters is what's true because of us. That's what's up for grabs. That's where the battle is. One remembers and values one's life not for its objective truths, but for the emotional truths...The only thing that's really true, that lasts, and makes life worthwhile is the truth that's fixed in the heart. That's what we live and die for. It comes in epiphanies, and it comes in love, and don't ever let frightened people turn you away from it.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“I wanted the music to be full, to surround us, to lift us like the swell, so I rented a bloody orchestra. You only live once.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“They glanced over at Catherine, who was dancing with Billy, as only fathers and daughters can dance. No matter how old the daughter may be, the father is dancing, in joy unparalleled, with his child when she was little.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke, and each time they thudded down, they said, you have only one life, you have only one life.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Humankind, or at least American-kind, will lose its edge as we produce more and more pipsqueaks and everyone gets nicer. Whole generations of pipsqueaks will be so fucking nice you won't be able to tell a man from a woman...And it will get worse and worse as people mistake nice for good. HItler was nice, supposedly, most of the time. A lot of good that did...”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Marriages are made in heaven which is why they cause so much trouble on earth.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, honor God by treating it, as he would, with neither fear nor respect.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre