Tracey > Tracey's Quotes

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.”
― Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody

“We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children...

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“We are always in a hurry to be happy...; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“She wanted to explain everything to him—how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“...the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist.Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”
― Francis Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. 'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never right anything but mediocre poetry.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“He lifted his arms to the crystaline, radiant sky.
"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle. That- is the great middle class.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise