Elene Nocek > Elene's Quotes

“It was amazing how a crisis could concentrate some minds while others went to pieces. Things had gone disastrously wrong in the last few days for Adam. His only worry before finding the book had been how to keep his girlfriend Linda without marrying her in the process. A contest he had lost.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“With tears of joy, I recalled Fat Mary’s role in my childhood. She had been my consoler and counselor since the day I understood I was alone in the world and had no one who loved me or wanted me. I had decided back then that I would love me, fat me, just as I was. Her role was also to safeguard the meaningful and happy moments of my childhood and bring them to me when I needed to remember life’s goodness.”
― Maria Nhambu, America's Daughter

“Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Mayors, Judges and Justices all fall prey to the Hitman.”
― RB Le `Deach, My Graphic Bipolar Fantasies: & Other Short Stories

“Danger made life interesting, but anxiety gets tiring after a while.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“Live long enough and you'll disappoint everyone. People think you're able to help them and usually you can't. And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint. The person in my life I am determined not to disappoint is you.”
― Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

“[Èl] oscilaría entre el egocentrismo y la depresión. Y en algún punto de esa ecuación se expondría a riesgos innecesarios.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

“Sometimes I felt as if I could not bear it any longer to be away from you!”
― Johanna Spyri, Heidi

“Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”
― Robert Frost

“Nothing dies in Hell.”
― John Patrick Kennedy, Plague of Angels

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”
― Margaret Atwood

“It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Lo absurdo no son las cosas, lo absurdo es que las cosas estén ahí y las sintamos como absurdas.”
― Julio Cortázar.

“Don't be very frightened, Marilla. I was walking the ridge-pole and I fell off. I suspect I have sprained my ankle. But, Marilla, I might have broken my neck. Let us look on the bright side of things.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“That defense alone is effectual, sure and durable which depends upon yourself and your own valour.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him-mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."

These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.

It is this spiritual freedom- which cannot be taken away- that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Until now he had thought that it was the world in general he had wanted to squirm away from. But it was not the world, it was the people in it.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.”
― Salman Rushdie , Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,--

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln”
― Abraham Lincoln

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
― Edith Wharton

“I'll do it!"
"No, you won't," Shane and Michael said, at virtually the same time. Shane continued. "You're barely on your feet, Claire. You don't go anywhere, not without me."
"And me," Michael said.
"Hell," Eve sighed. "I guess that means I have to go, too. Which I may not ever forgive you for, even if I don't die horribly.”
― Rachel Caine, Lord of Misrule

“That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“It's tough out there, boy, and as long as there are people, there’s gonna be somebody trying to take what you got and trying to drag you down. It's up to you whether you let them or not.”
― Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry