Hannah Chung > Hannah's Quotes

“There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.”
― John Knowles

“But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
― John Steinbeck, شرق بهشت

“A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I think I love you, Cal." -Abra
I'm not good." -Cal
Because you're not good." -Abra”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It's a good thing to be loved, even late”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Allah is all in all. Allah sees you, and is with you, wherever you are, whatever you do.”
― Anonymous, القرآن الكريم

“Waste of money. Only need cleaver.”
― Lily LaMotte, Measuring Up: A Graphic Novel

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“I did not know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“You need to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago