Petra > Petra's Quotes

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
― Wallace Stevens

“There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the years were drawing nigh when she should say, 'I have no pleasure in them', than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed over here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm.”
― Thomas Hardy

“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”
― Wallace Stevens

“It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what.”
― Kate Chopin

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Where there's life there's hope.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

"What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"

"All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.

...

"Good morning!" he said at last. "We don't want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water." By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.
"What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!" said Gandalf. "Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won't be good till I move off.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“He [Maxime] was twenty, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most extreme forms of debauchery. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth.”
― Émile Zola, La Curée

“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I talk so trivially about life because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“It was better to die, like Eugénie and Digby, in the prime of life with all one's faculties about one. But he wasn't like that, she thought, glancing at the press cuttings. 'A man of singularly handsome presence... shot, fished, and played golf.' No, not like that in the least. He had been a curious man; weak; sensitive; liking titles; liking pictures; and often depressed, she guessed , by his wife's exuberance. She pushed the cuttings away and took up her book. It was odd how different the same person seemed to two different people, she thought. There was Martin, liking Eugénie; and she, liking Digby. She began to read.
She had always wanted to know about Christianity - how it began; what it meant, originally. God is love, The kingdom of Heaven is within us, sayings like that she thought, turning over the pages, what did they mean? The actual words were very beautiful. But who said them - when? Then the spout of the tea-kettle puffed steam at her and she moved it away. The wind was rattling the windows in the back room; it was bending the little bushes; they still had no leaves on them. It was what a man said under a fig tree, on a hill, she thought. And then another man wrote it down. But suppose that what that man says is just as false as what this man - she touched the press cuttings with her spoon - says about Digby? And here I am, she thought, looking at the china in the Dutch cabinet, in this drawing-room, getting a little spark from what someone said all those years ago - here it comes (the china was changing from blue to livid) skipping over all those mountains, all those seas. She found her place and began to read.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Years

“I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty and I wonder how the same can be both.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories