Miranda > Miranda's Quotes

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.”
― James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

“Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“A precious mouldering pleasure 't is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,

His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind.
The literature of old;

What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty,
And Sophocles a man;

When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,

He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true:
He lived where dreams were born.

His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize just so.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“If you will come
I shall put out
new pillows for
you to rest on”
― Sappho, Sappho: A New Translation

“What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?”
― Euripides, Medea

“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“the story goes”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“We was girls together”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“...for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
― Albert Einstein

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.”
― Terence