Jasmeen > Jasmeen's Quotes

“The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.”
― Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881-1897

“Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.”
― Jean Rhys

“Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.

But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one and the same. For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me - as a girl and later as a woman - to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“تلك كانت المرة الأولى التي ارى فيها تلك الإيماءة التي كانت تعني أننا كنا عاجزين عن منع روح أحد نحبه من المغادرة إلى عالم الأرواح. يمكننا ان نحارب الموت, ولكنه حالما يقبض على أحدهم فلا شيء يمكن فعله بعد ذلك.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“I am still learning about love. I thought I understood it--not just mother love, but the love for one's parents, for one's husband, and for one's laotong. I've experienced the other types of love--pity love, respectful love and gratitude love. But looking at our secret fan with its messages written between Snow Flower and me over many years, I see that I didn't value the most important love--deep-heart love.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for a person who was my husband.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Margaret was not a ready lover, but where she loved she loved passionately, and with no small degree of jealousy.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“Wearily she went to bed, wearily she arose in four or five hours' time. But with the morning came hope, and a brighter view of things.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He fell to the seat, she by his side. There were no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that the birds sing, that the snow melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawns whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills?
One kiss, and that was all.

Both trembled, and they looked at each other in the darkness with brilliant eyes.

They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp ground, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts were full of thought. They had clasped hands, without knowing it.

She did not ask him; did not even think where and how he had managed to get into the garden. It seemed so natural to her that he should be there.

From time to time Marius’ knee touched Cosette’s. A touch that thrilled.
At times, Cosette faltered out a word. Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.

Gradually, they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fullness. The night was serene and glorious above their heads. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their frenzies, their ecstasies, their chimeras, their despondencies, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other. They had confided to each other in an intimacy of the ideal, which already, nothing could have increased, all that was most hidden and most mysterious in themselves. They told each other, with a candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth and the remnant of childhood that was theirs, brought to mind. These two hearts poured themselves out to each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul and the young girl who had the soul of the young man. They interpenetrated, they enchanted, they dazzled each other.

When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid her head on his shoulder, and asked him: "What is your name?"

My name is Marius," he said. "And yours?"
My name is Cosette.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“And you'll always love me won't you?
Yes
And the rain won't make any difference?
No”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“I am always in love.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When I was your age, television was called books.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”
― Bob Ross

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own