Ashley > Ashley's Quotes

“When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time.”
― Maya Angelou

“Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.”
― Richard Dawkins

“I loved something I made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn't see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.”
― Albert Einstein

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

“What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, It Seems to Me: Selected Letters

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“i want to apologize to all the women i have called beautiful
before i’ve called them intelligent or brave
i am sorry i made it sound as though
something as simple as what you’re born with
is all you have to be proud of
when you have broken mountains with your wit
from now on i will say things like
you are resilient, or you are extraordinary
not because i don’t think you’re beautiful
but because i need you to know
you are more than that”
― Rupi Kaur

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She's not perfect—you aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break—her heart. So don't hurt her, don't change her, don't analyze and don't expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she's not there.”
― Bob Marley

“Let’s all stop pretending that selfies are an aberration of the high art we’re creating with our smart phones or that posting a photo of yourself is somehow an interruption of the high-level discourse we are used to sharing on social media. You know what selfies can show you? Yourself. And you are worth looking at. You are worth marveling at.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“I remember trying to explain it to you, and realizing that you had already glazed over and checked out, and I could have said “because one time I saw the face of Jesus in a hot dog and he told me that if I ate him I could have eternal life” and you wouldn’t have noticed. What I want to say to you now, is this: I believe in God now, but not because of Catechism. Not because of what someone told me, or an essay I had to write for credit. I believe in God because I see God every day. I see God in people. I feel God in people. God is not a disinterested Father. God is love. She is air. God is seeing you carry Ralph to the car after your soccer games, in the wrinkling of your baby brother’s nose when you make him smile, in the story of you covering your little sister’s ears so she didn’t hear your mom and dad fighting when you were both so little.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“But how you feel love and understand love are two different things.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“When I was mad, I didn’t raise my voice. Instead, I lowered it to a register that you heard with your bones, not your ears.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Once you'd resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“One thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle