Shany > Shany's Quotes

“Not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it’s time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid.”
― Zadie Smith, NW

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“Never forget the nine most important words of any family-

I love you.
You are beautiful.
Please forgive me.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr.

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“...the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.”
― Zadie Smith, NW

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale