Sophie > Sophie's Quotes

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“My first impression of Venice was that it might be hard to make anything happen there. Everything seemed to have already happened. Venice seemed like a kind of exalted remembering.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“Do you know what the most secret stubbornly-defended part of our identity is? It’s the private concessions we make to our cowardice.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Everyone tells lies to get what they want. First of all we tell lies to ourselves and then we tell them to everyone else. That's what the past becomes - a kind of flower bed in which you're uprooting and replanting all the time.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“If you're learning any craft my advice would always be to emulate and aspire to a master. Sure, you're placing an obstacle field in your path, but what is happiness after all if not the overcoming of obstacles?”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“I learned in those days that it's the mind's apprehension of beauty which renews everything, which enables us to see the world for the first time again. Beauty is a private moment in the mind, which we then seek to communicate.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Personal relationships are paramount in life. At their best they can confirm the highest ideals we have about human life. Relationships are how we learn about ourselves. How we evolve, both as individuals and communities. How we learn about the world around us. Relationships are the most accessible source of inspiration. They can bring us to our knees; they can move us close to heaven. Personal relationships are our sacred text, our scripture.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Most of us carry around the extravagant hope that the world can at least catch a glimpse of what we consider to be our true face. We can't help harbouring the desire that past achievements and former incarnations still reveal some glimpse of themselves on our person. That people might be able to read the history of a face and not just its live bulletins.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“I wanted to apologise, not only for not recognising her which had granted me an unwarranted advantage at her expense, but also for how much I had aged since our last meeting. As if this was a flaw in my character. As if I had now ruined her memories of me. No wonder we love art so much - the beauty that forever remains unaltered.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby