Madison E > Madison's Quotes

“We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

“As always, the ocean seemed angrier than the marsh. Deeper, it had more to say.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“I am malicious because I am miserable”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

“Books are enchanted. Books help me travel. Books help me breathe.”
― Margarita Engle, Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings

“Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose. The hope that in this world, there are magical fish who will give you advice and warning, when really, the future is unknowable and infinitely dangerous.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself.”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

“All human things are subject to decay”
― John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
― Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

“We look up for God, but tears have made us blind.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Cry of the Children

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“The tin man
is ruined
by butterflies”
― Manoel de Barros, Birds for a Demolition

“Nobody fathers a poem without dying.”
― Manoel de Barros, Birds for a Demolition

“Yesterday it rained in the future.”
― Manoel de Barros

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“This is worse than Mordor!’ said Sam. ‘Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King