Francesca Rock > Francesca's Quotes

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mostly Sally

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. ”
― W.C. Fields

“Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts”
― Jose Saramago

“Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
― Abigail Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
― Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.”
― Sue Grafton, M is for Malice

“It is never too late to be wise.”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.”
― Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance

“If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.
The book needs you.”
― Gary Paulsen, The Winter Room

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
― John Green

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

“Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Two Much

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.”
― Tony Kushner, Perestroika