Airs > Airs's Quotes

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.”
― Mark Twain

“Because she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn't hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. You didn't need her. You didn't need anyone. And without even knowing you were doing it, you waited. You waited for anyone who got close to you to see something they didn't like in you, something they hadn't initially seen, and to grow cold and disappear, too, like so much sea mist. Because there had to be something wrong, didn't there, if even your own mother didn't really love you?”
― Jojo Moyes, One Plus One

“The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you had your mother at your back, you'd be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.”
― Jojo Moyes, One Plus One

“When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.”
― Jojo Moyes, One Plus One

“Who was it who had said you were only as happy as your unhappiest child?”
― Jojo Moyes, One Plus One

“It wasn't that Ed would make it okay--he had his own problems to deal with--but somehow the sum of them added up to something better. They would make it okay.”
― Jojo Moyes, One Plus One

“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Mrs Forrester said you could ruin a thing by wishing for something else. "If you're having fun at the beach, like we are, but you spend all your time here wishing you could be here all the time, you're wasting the time you're here.”
― Diane Chamberlain, Necessary Lies

“In those days, I straddled more than a handful of worlds, which is also to say I belonged wholly to none.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

“Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us.
For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm.
It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him... were running out.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It's a myth that people who live in cities are naturally more open-minded, more accepting and tolerant of difference. The truth is, whatever people are, be it saints or bigots, they simply are these things, and the city - by smashing all those different kinds of people up against one another - just makes people's tolerance (or lack of it) all that much more pronounced.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

“It dawned on me that no person is as poetically homesick as someone who has come to New York for the first time and glimpsed a small vestige of her home state.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

“I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
― J. Richard Lessor

“In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time...I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well...I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room

“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.”
― Albert Pike

“She gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5, $10, or $25 toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“There was something in the way he posed a question and followed it up with a generous pause, I think, that drew me out. I had never noticed all the pauses that were missing from most people's conversations.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

“We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying. If we choose to count ourselves among the brave, we write ourselves as the villains we are, hoping for redemption.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

“That's the funny thing about doubt." "What do you mean?" "It makes you feel rotten as hell. But if anyone bothered to think about it, it's a symptom of love. It means it matters to you. It's the brain questioning the wisdom of the heart. It doesn't mean the heart doesn't know better all along, it only means the brain doesn't understand how.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“Happy is not the right word. This world is not a place where we can be happy. It wasn’t created for man’s happiness, though many believe this is the reason of our existence. I think we are here to fight, so that good and evil can clash within us, and good may prevail, thus enriching us spiritually. It’s difficult to say whether we are happy or not: it doesn’t depend on us… There are times when one regrets being born, but life also gives us surprising things that, alone, are worth living. The issue of happiness doesn’t exist for me: happiness as such doesn’t exist.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“I thought so. Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered. As a child, I used to cover my face with my hands so that no one would know I was there. And then I discovered that covering my face made me more visible because everyone was curious to see what it was I wanted to hide in the first place.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“Sometimes, I find myself limping. It's as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“but the phrase about the dream being over implied that something had started and had now ended. It was up to the dreamer to say it was over, no one else could say it on their behalf.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk