Clara > Clara's Quotes

“I’ve always suspected that a sense of humour is a kind of parlour trick we civilized folk have taught ourselves as an insurance against disillusionment.”
― Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree

“Better to wear out than to rust out!”
― Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring

“Nobody ever realized that Celia was shy. They thought she was haughty and conceited. Nobody realized how humble this pretty girl was feeling—how bitterly conscious of her social defects.”
― Mary Westmacott, Unfinished Portrait

“For it seems to me that it is good to remember that there were such days and such places, and that at this very minute my little hill of marigolds is in bloom, and old men with white beards trudging behind their donkeys may not even know there is a war. ‘It does not touch us here…”
― Agatha Christie Mallowan, Come, Tell Me How You Live

“He nods his head. ‘Is it the English this country belongs to now? I cannot remember. I know it is no longer the Turks.’ ‘No,’ we say; ‘the Turks have not been here since the war.’ ‘A war?’ says the old man, puzzled. ‘The war that was fought twenty years ago.’ He reflects. ‘I do not remember a war… Ah yes, about the time you mention, many ’asker went to and fro over the railway. That, then, was the war? We did not realize it was a war. It did not touch us here.’ Presently, after another long silence, he rises, bids us farewell politely, and is gone.”
― Agatha Christie Mallowan, Come, Tell Me How You Live

“People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.”
― Ruth Ware, In a Dark, Dark Wood

“My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we're no good, that if we don't make this promotion or ace that exam we'll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are Maybe that's true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.”
― Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10

“A lie can outlast any truth.”
― ruth ware, The Lying Game

“Imagine we could see the damage inside ourselves. Imagine it showed through us like contraband on an airport scanner. What would it be like, to walk around the city with it all on view – all the hurts and the betrayals and the things that diminished us; all the crushed dreams and the broken hearts? What would it be like to see the people our lives have made us? The people we are, under our skin. I”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“Just how many ways it's possible to fuck up a child so badly that ten, twenty, forty years later they're still trying to make sense of it.”
― Tammy Cohen, When She Was Bad

“There are very few moments in life when you see yourself for what you are. Not how you'd like to be, or how you think other people see you. These moments are very sobering.”
― Sabine Durrant, Having It and Eating It

“You carry people around with you in your character; all the people you have been close to have made you a little bit of what you are.”
― Sabine Durrant, The Great Indoors

“friendships don’t come free, you have to work at them—take the plunge, even when you’re scared.”
― Sabine Durrant, Under Your Skin

“Living a life that isn’t meant for you is its own version of hell.”
― Jennifer Hillier, Jar of Hearts

“Who would have thought that who you love and who you feel safe with might not be the same person?”
― Jennifer Hillier, Little Secrets

“You know what it’s like having a child? ... It’s like your heart walking out the door on two legs, vulnerable and unprotected. It’s scary as hell.”
― Jennifer Hillier, Little Secrets

“You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't. It's the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future.”
― Rebecca Serle, In Five Years

“There's no 'rational grounds' for anything I care about.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people.”
― Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

“Had our hearts really become so numb that we needed dead bodies in order to feel the beat of compassion in our chests? Who am I if I need to be shocked back into my best self?”
― Jason Reynolds, All American Boys

“If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong.”
― Groucho Marx

“Your thorns are the best part of you.”
― Marianne Moore

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“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

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“For you, a thousand times over”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero