Ishan > Ishan's Quotes

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“She's an old lady and she's ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it's your job not to let her make you mad.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Man without life companion is either god or beast.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“Part of me knows one more day won't do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“C'est courageux d'aller dans l'inconnu': It is courageous to go into territory unknown.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“People look to the order of numbers when the world falls apart.”
― Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

“I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logic or reasons can be found.”
― Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

“Fermat’s assertion that if n is any whole number and p any prime, then n multiplied by itself p times minus n is divisible by p.”
― Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

“How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you.”
― Ruskin Bond - Delhi is not far

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“One of the risks of being quiet is that the other people can fill your silence with their own interpretation: You’re bored. You’re depressed. You’re shy. You’re stuck up. You’re judgemental. When others can’t read us, they write their own story—not always one we choose or that’s true to who we are.”
― Sophia Dembling, The Introvert's Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World

“What is a friend? We probably all have our own definitions. For me, it's someone I don't feel alone with. Who doesn't bore me. Whose life I connect with and who takes reciprocal interest in my life. It's someone I feel comfortable turning to when I need to be talked off the ledge, and for whom I am glad to return the favor.
Just a few people in my life fit that bill.”
― Sophia Dembling, The Introvert's Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Deadlines just aren't real to me until I'm staring one in the face.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say.”
― Mitch Albom, Have a Little Faith: a True Story

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes of the sky,
And you ask "What if I fall?"
Oh but my darling,
What if you fly?”
― Erin Hanson

“So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X [Japanese-Language Edition].

“It kills me sometimes, how people die.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.”
― Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

“Three Rules To Write By

Write naked.
That means to write what you would never say.

Write in blood.
As if ink is so precious you can’t waste it.

Write in exile
as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.

Denis Johnson”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate