Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: it's got to be the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.”
― Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe

“The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack: the round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens to their dens.”
― William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

“I wanted to teach myself some life lessons at the age of 60 and one of them was that you don’t give up.”
― Diana Nyad

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
― Ray Bradbury

“As soon as I take down her book and open it...My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.”
― Eavan Boland

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
― Wallace Stevens

“People do not change, they are merely revealed.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Literature is humanity talking to itself.”
― Norman Rush

“You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“In a time of destruction, create something.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.”
― Will Self

“When I asked 'Have you ever had thoughts of suicide in your post-war life?' none of those I interviewed answered in the affirmative. On the contrary, the response of a survivor of Auschwitz, Jack Saltzman, echoed the sentiments of many: 'I wouldn't give the bastards the satisfaction.”
― Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory