TAN > TAN's Quotes

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”
― Noton Juster Phantom Tollbooth

“You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“There was no aphrodisiac more powerful than talking, no seduction more effective than curiosity.”
― Manju Kapur

“As immigrants fly across oceans they shed their old clothing because clothes maketh the man and new ones help ease the transition. Men's clothing has less international variations; the change is not so drastic. But those women who are not used to wearing western clothes find themselves in a dilemma. If they focus on integration, convenience and conformity they have to sacrifice habit, style and self-perception.”
― Manju Kapur

“If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Justice," she said. " I've heard that word. It's a cold world. I tried it out," she said, still speaking in that low voice. "I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
― Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye

“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.
But then because you have to do all this, when you get to the final step, something strange has happened to you and you speak the way a drunk walks. And, because you are speaking like falling, it's as if you are an idiot, when the truth is that it's the language and the whole process that's messed up. And then the problem with those who speak only English is this: they don't know how to listen; they are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo We Need New Names

“If you are stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. This way, people can’t see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don’t know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“[Jesus Christ] used to have blue eyes but I painted them brown like mine and everybody’s, to make him normal.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“Do it again.
Play it again. Sing it again. Read it again. Write it again. Sketch it again. Rehearse it again. Run it again. Try it again.
Because again is practice, and practice is improvement, and improvement only leads to perfection.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world...”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again.

”
― Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Two Other Plays

“It's fierce, an' it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great.”
― Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave

“There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.”
― Edmund White

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better.”
― Ransom Riggs, Hollow City

“I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.”
― Ransom Riggs, Hollow City

“A song and a smile from someone I cared about could be enough to distract me from all that darkness, if only for a little while.”
― Ransom Riggs, Hollow City

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Having as little to do with human beings as possible - in some weird way, I'm at peace.”
― Nina Simone

“If it no go so, it go near so. —Jamaican proverb”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“—The problem with a book is that you never know what it’s planning to do to you until you’re too far into it.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins