Beth > Beth's Quotes

“Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

“You live but once; you might as well be amusing.”
― Coco Chanel

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.”
― Richard Ford, Wildlife

“the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

“Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“Jivan: You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It's not true. It's very hard to find.
Nedra: I haven't been looking for it.
Jivan: It's like a tree...It takes a long time to grow. It has roots very deep, and these roots stretch out a long way, farther than you know. You can't cut it, just like that.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day's growth beard makes a man look careless; two days', derelict; and four days', polluted. Blix and Weston hadn't shaved for three.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

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"Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“Who's Johnnie Walker?"
"It's a drink. For grown-ups."
"Is it nice?"
"Makes you drunk."
"What's it like being drunk?"
"Like being awake and asleep at the same time."
"Sounds nice."
"It was meant to sound terrible," he said looking down his glasses at her. "You get sick and stagger around. People actually vomit sometimes.”
― Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Everybody should have someone whose belief in them is unwavering, unconditional, always.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.”
― Richard Ford

“A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life.”
― Richard Ford