Freida Bemer > Freida's Quotes

“It was 3:57 AM. An explosion hit me from beneath my bedroom floor like an atomic bomb, jolting me awake. Its concussive wave carried horrible colors, smells and textures, but among them floated a familiar purple. I sat up, shivering with revulsion while the aftershocks flowed over me. As I focused on the warm, sweet purple buried inside the frigid, choking grey, my eyes widened with recognition. Mom!”
― Darin C. Brown, The Taste of Despair

“She’d worn anxiety like a thick robe for so long that it was hard for her to take it off.”
― Pernell Plath Meier, In Our Bones

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Truly, the colored race are the most cheerful and forgiving people on the face of the earth. That their masters sleep in safety is owing to their superabundance of heart; and yet they look upon their sufferings with less pity than they would bestow on those of a horse or a dog.”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“In that twisted incestuous way of fate, Mia's a part of our history, and we're among the shards of her legacy.”
― Gayle Forman, Where She Went

“You have a peace about you. You have a wisdom. You have a way of living life that kicks my butt and pushes me around, and it beats me out of my idiocy and narrow-mindness. You, Addy, you, have shown me what life is all about”
― Heath Sommer

“On est considéré, à Paris, à cause de sa voiture et non à cause de sa vertu.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Her words used to have power. If she said it was fine, it was fine. But after you’ve held two people as they took their last breaths, words like that don’t mean shit anymore.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I think....you still have no idea. The effect you can have.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“I smoothed Colton’s blanket across his chest and tucked him in snug the
way he liked—and for the first time since he started talking about heaven, I
intentionally tried to trip him up. “I remember you saying you stayed with
Pop,” I said. “So when it got dark and you went home with Pop, what did
you two do?”
Suddenly serious, Colton scowled at me. “It doesn’t get dark in heaven,
Dad! Who told you that?”
I held my ground. “What do you mean it doesn’t get dark?”
“God and Jesus light up heaven. It never gets dark. It’s always bright.”
The joke was on me. Not only had Colton not fallen for the “when it gets
dark in heaven” trick, but he could tell me why it didn’t get dark: “The city
does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives
it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.”
― Todd Burpo, Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

“Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman ....”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Maybe all the people who say ghosts don't exist are just afraid to admit that they do.”
― Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

“Anyone who is observant, who discovers the person they have always dreamed of, knows that sexual energy comes into play before sex even takes place. The greatest pleasure isn't sex, but the passion with which it is practiced. When the passion is intense, then sex joins in to complete the dance, but it is never the principal aim.”
― Paulo Coelho

“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Throughout history humans have inflicted countless violent, cruel, and hurtful acts on each other, and continue to do so. Are they all to be condemned; are they all guilty? Or are those acts simply expressions of unconsciousness, an evolutionary stage that we are now growing out of?

Jesus’ words, “Forgive them for they do not know what they do,” also apply to yourself.”
― Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

“The pen is mightier than the sword... an considerably easier to write with. - Marty Feldman”
― Tom Sechrist

“Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.”
― Richard Wright, Cliffs Notes on Wright's Black Boy

“I’m a hard nut to crack, and I take it standing up.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

“Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I'll have a witty and blistering retort! You'll be devastated THEN”
― Bill Watterson

“Kill me. If you’ve ever been my friend, kill me.”
― James Dashner, The Death Cure

“Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it's not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way. But our minds move in a dozen different directions. We can't be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders. It means we can't be controlled. And it means that no matter what they do, we will always cause trouble for them.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“Would you like me to put you out of your misery, before I put you out of your misery?”
― Paul Cude, Bentwhistle the Dragon in a Threat from the Past

“And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“إن الرضا عن الذات مرادف للانحطاط والجهل، وطموح المرء خير له من قناعة زائفة تعمي عينيه وتغُل يديه،”
― Edwin A. Abbott, ‫ الأرض المسطحة‬

“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some...thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open”
― Tim O'Brien

“Here's Coleridge, in 1804, when he turned thirty-two: 'Yesterday was my Birth Day. So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month. - O Sorrow and Shame...I have done nothing!”
― anthony doerr, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World