Emma > Emma's Quotes

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers...”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it -- and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Do what I will never do.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey