Kelli Rick > Kelli's Quotes

“The room was an oasis in a desert of depression.”
― Marilyn Dalla Valle, Westwind Secrets

“What is it that inspires you? What do you love to do? What would you do for free? At the beginning of my busi-ness career, my why was to become a millionaire, not a good why! And why not? Because that is an aspiration rather than a why. Aspirations, I have found, won’t fuel me when the going gets tough. But a true “why” will.”
― Richard Polak

“Eli was known to run a tight ship, and the last few years, old Pat had neglected the”
― Michael Phillip Cash, The After House

“Beth looks to Steven, "You should have stayed in Hell.”
― Carl Novakovich, The Watchers: The Tomb

“boy,”
― Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree

“If a man believed all that other people choose to say in their own favor, he might get an oversized opinion of them, and an udersized opinion of himself.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer

“There's only one degree of freshness — the first, which makes it also the last”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth's burden.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute : View of the American Revolution

“Here's what I think," I say and my voice is stronger and thoughts are coming, thoughts that trickle into my noise like whispers of truth. "I think maybe everybody falls," I say. "I think maybe we all do. And I don't think that's the asking."
I pull on her arms gently to make sure she's listening.
"I think the asking is whether we get back up again.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes – characters even – caught in the fibres of your clothes, and when you open the new book they are still with you.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“They alone moved through the vast inertness. They alone were alive, and they sought for other things that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to live.”
― Jack London, White Fang

“Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Truly, I did not intend to harm you, he said. That was never my intention.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Magician's Elephant

“And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.

What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then.

Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I'm aware of what you've done for me, and I'm not ungrateful. I appreciate that you actually showed yourself to be greater than your prejudices and have given me a chance here. But I don't want you for my lover, and you're not my father.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

“Sometimes laughter is the only way to process tough times”
― Todd Burpo, Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

“One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of [zucchini] hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight ... Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke ... It's a relaxed atmosphere in our little town, plus our neighbors keep an eye out and will, if asked, tell us the make and model of every vehicle that ever enters the lane to our farm. So the family was a bit surprised when I started double-checking the security of doors and gates any time we all were about to leave the premises.
"Do I have to explain the obvious?" I asked impatiently. "Somebody might break in and put zucchini in our house.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life