Alexandra > Alexandra's Quotes

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Standing there with our heads tilted back to the sky, our faces lit by ancient starlight and the dying fires of those fragments of a planet broken up long ago, I forgot where I was, what I had gone through, what I had lost.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”
― Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Personally, I think she liked living there, between the pages with him. Always adding little bits of memory but never closing the door.”
― Rebecca Yarros, The Things We Leave Unfinished

“You are the culmination of every lightning strike and twist of fate.”
― Rebecca Yarros, The Things We Leave Unfinished

“That is the thing with giving your heart. You never wait for someone to ask. You hold it out and hope they want it”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“For a moment he laughed, forgetting where they were, how depressing the backdrop. For a moment there was just her smile, the musical cadence of her voice, and the hint of flirtation. Then the world exploded.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“They created a strange tableau: rabid boy, trapped girl, bombed-out building. It suggested a tale that could only end in tragedy. Star-crossed lovers meeting their fate. A revenge story turned in on itself. A war saga that took no prisoners.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“You're mine and I'm yours. It's written in the stars.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“A tendency toward obsession was hardwired into his brain and would likely be his undoing if he couldn’t learn to outsmart it.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“His mind could fixate on a problem like that — anything, really — and not let go. As if controlling one element of his world would keep him from ruin. It was a bad habit that blinded him to other things that could harm him. A tendency towards obsession was hardwired into his brain and would likely be his undoing if he couldn't learn to outsmart it.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrified me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Anything beautiful should be given a name, do you not agree?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”
― Twan Eng Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“It was odd how Aritomo's life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“I am an echo of a sound made a lifetime ago.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”
― Federico García Lorca

“I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“He was always leaning on something, like he couldn’t bear to hold all his own weight upright for more than a second or two. He lounged, he sprawled, he hunched and reclined. He never simply stood or sat. In college, I’d thought he was lazy about everything except writing. Now I wondered if he was simply tired, if life had beaten him into a permanent slouch, folded him over himself so no one could get at the soft center, the kid who dreamed of running away on trains and living in the branches of a redwood.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black