P. > P.'s Quotes

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it.
I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled.
I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively.
I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.”
― Lemony Snicket

“If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator

“Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.”
― Coco Chanel

“There is a time for work, and a time for love. That leaves no other time.”
― Coco Chanel

“If you're sad, add more lipstick and attack. Men hate women who weep.”
― Coco Chanel

“So many things to see, people to do.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“The truth was I'd given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”
― Tove Jansson

“Maybe my passion is nothing special, but at least it's mine.

- An Eightieth Birthday”
― Tove Jansson, Travelling Light

“It was a particularly good evening to begin a book.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“I'll have to calm down a bit. Or else I'll burst with happiness”
― Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

“There's no need to imagine that you're a wondrous beauty, because that's what you are.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

“The thing about God, she thought, is that He usually does help, but not until you've made an effort on your own.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane