Mudra > Mudra's Quotes

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Je ne give a damn pas about le français, Les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love."

I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.”
― John Knowles , A Separate Peace

“Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Sixteen is the key and crucial and natural age for a human being to be, and people of all other ages are ranged in an orderly manner ahead of and behind you as a harmonious setting for the sixteen-year-olds of this world.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?”
― Isabel Allende, The Japanese Lover

“Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love.”
― Isabel Allende, The Japanese Lover

“If nothing hurts, that means I woke up dead,”
― Isabel Allende, The Japanese Lover

“I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.”
― Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train

“We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go