Zaara > Zaara's Quotes

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“There were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who savored the same book repeatedly. Now she understood those rereaders differently ... she realized it was not the rereading that led to fresh insights. It was the rereader-- because when a person is changing inside, there are inevitably new things to see.”
― Rachel Simon, The Story of Beautiful Girl

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

“See, I’m in love with the person you can never outrun. I’m in love with you.”
― Laura Miller, Butterfly Weeds, Butterfly Weeds

“Tell me you’ve seen the world.
Now, you’ve come back home
Tell me you’ve carried me with you,
That you’ve held me close.
Tell me you’ve missed me
Or that I’m not crazy for waiting cause
Of all the butterflies that chose to stay,
I’m in love with the one that got away”
― Laura Miller, Butterfly Weeds, Butterfly Weeds

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“And still, after all this time,
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe Me."

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.”
― Hafiz

“Travel brings power and love back into your life.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din

“Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

(Little Gidding)”
― T.S. Eliot

“The chief beauty about time
is that you cannot waste it in advance.
The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,
as perfect, as unspoiled,
as if you had never wasted or misapplied
a single moment in all your life.
You can turn over a new leaf every hour
if you choose.”
― Arnold Bennett

“Realize that if a door closed, it’s because what was behind it wasn’t meant for you.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence

“Rather than turning the page, it's much easier to just throw the book away.”
― Anthony Liccione

“I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”
― Stephen Greenblatt

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”
― George Saunders

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein