Andrew > Andrew's Quotes

“As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief; He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.”
― Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words--changing nothing.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., Grendel

“There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., Grendel

“I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., Grendel

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.”
― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

“Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”
― Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead

“The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay