Annie > Annie's Quotes

“And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they build cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.”
― Raymond Chandler

“All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it should consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us, and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.”
― Italo Calvino

“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“A man’s conscience may tell him to do the vilest things.”
― Elizabeth Anscombe

“There are some ten thousand extant religious sects--each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain--which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
― Edward Everett Hale

“For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past "causes" which we may assign to it, this past itself comes into being only with the event itself.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
― St. Francis Of Assisi, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

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

“Laughter is carbonated holiness.”
― Anne Lamott

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box

“A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.”
― Frank Serafini

“If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”
― Carl Sagan

“Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“When we commemorate the end of a war, we neglect the way that it began. Every war ends, after all; but not every war had to begin.”
― Timothy Snyder (author)

“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
― Martin Buber

“The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

“errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum: 'to err is human, but to persist (in the mistake) is diabolical.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke