alexandra > alexandra's Quotes

“Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.”
― W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks & Other Light Verse

“You cannot see me from where I look at myself.”
― Francesca Woodman

“The wondrous moment of our meeting...
Still I remember you appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In hopeless ennui surrounding
The worldly bustle, to my ear
For long your tender voice kept sounding,
For long in dreams came features dear.

Time passed. Unruly storms confounded
Old dreams, and I from year to year
Forgot how tender you had sounded,
Your heavenly features once so dear.

My backwoods days dragged slow and quiet --
Dull fence around, dark vault above --
Devoid of God and uninspired,
Devoid of tears, of fire, of love.

Sleep from my soul began retreating,
And here you once again appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In ecstasy my heart is beating,
Old joys for it anew revive;
Inspired and God-filled, it is greeting
The fire, and tears, and love alive.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“You think you know death, but you don't, not until you've seen it, really seen it... And it gets under your skin and lives inside you.

You also think you know life, stand on the edge of things and what you go by but you're not living it, not really, you're just a tourist, a ghost, then you see it, really see it, it gets under your skin and lives inside you, and there's no escape, there's nothing to be done, and you know what? it's good, it's a good thing.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about it.”
― Jack O'Connell

“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We are greater than the sum of our parts.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.”
― John Green

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”
― John Green

“So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me. And the accicide, the student, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I assist your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla,”
― John Green

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― Jonh Green

“Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“So many things become beautiful when you really look.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“And I guess that's when it starts to hit me: the whole point is, you do what you can.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Are you ever afraid to go to sleep? Afraid of what comes next?”

He smiles a sad little smile and I swear it’s like he knows. “Sometimes I’m afraid of what I’m leaving behind,” he says.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Some things are better left buried and forgotten.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Nobody ever said life was fair.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall