Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“In that instant they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition's original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?

No.

It's never like what you expected.

Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it?
Yes. It does.
There's a lot of things look better at a distance.
Yeah?
I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one.
Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Most bad," the host concluded. "If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Let my country die for me.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“I knew every raindrop by its name.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Even the works of Shakespeare might be more thoroughly appreciated if they were re-examined from unorthodox positions. Someone, once in a while, should take a good long look at Hamlet through his legs.”
― Sōseki Natsume, I Am a Cat

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises