Diya > Diya's Quotes

“Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”
― Stephen King, Night Shift

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Time doth flit; oh shit.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure ”
― Joseph Campbell

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
― Lewis Carroll

“Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“We'll Go No More A-roving

So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart still be as loving,
And the moon still be as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.”
― Lord Byron, Byron: Poetical Works

“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“..in the 21st century, we
don’t need to march against size zero models, risible pornography,
lap-dancing clubs and Botox. We don’t need to riot, or go on hunger
strike. There’s no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even a
donkey. We just need to look it in the eye, squarely, for a minute,
and then start laughing at it. We look hot when we laugh. People
fancy us when they observe us giving out relaxed, earthy chuckles.”
― Caitlin Moran

“After all, you can argue – argue until you cry – about what
modern, codified misogyny is; but straight-up ungentlemanliness,
of the kind his mother would clatter the back of his head for, is
inarguable. It doesn’t need to be a ‘man vs woman’ thing. It’s just a
tiff between The Guys.
Seeing the whole world as ‘The Guys’ is important. The idea
that we’re all, at the end of the day, just a bunch of well-meaning
schlumps, trying to get along, is the basic alpha and omega of my
world view. I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘antimen’. I’m just ‘Thumbs
up for the six billion’.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“Or perhaps we should just junk the whole idea of getting
married in the first place. I’m generally against anything where
you’re supposed to change your name. When else do you get
named something else? On joining a nunnery, or becoming a porn
star. As an ostensibly joyful celebration of love, that’s bad company
to be in.”
― Caitlin Moran

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

“Outside, the world whistled. The rain was stained.”
― Markus Zusak

“That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that --I didn't let it-- and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Crowley was currently doing 110 mph somewhere east of Slough. Nothing about him looked particularly demonic, at least by classical standards. No horns no wings. Admittedly he was listening to a Best of Queen tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums”
― Neil Gaiman

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
― Sylvia Plath

“Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“What the eye doesn’t see the stomach doesn’t heave over.”
― Stephen Fry

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“I worry for a second that she wants to set us up: I am not interested in being set up. I need to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love-jackal. I'm too self-conscious otherwise. I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I'm obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I've basically turned into Liza Minelli: I'm dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There's a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl