Julia Smeaton > Julia's Quotes

“I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“The truth is: I did want to be my dad's poem. I wanted to be his drawing, his novella, his most refined work of art. I wanted him to shape me with his love and intelligence. I wanted him to edit out my mistakes and many indulgences, with a sharp red pencil or a clean eraser.”
― Alysia Abbott, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

“You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end. (Jo March)”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Miss Barry was a kindred spirit after all," Anne confided to Marilla, "You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she is. . . Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“I love bright red drinks, don’t you? They taste twice as good as any other color.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Youth is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

“I think I've come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am.”
― Jenny Slate

“I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don’t like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I said to him that just because you can’t remember, doesn’t mean the past isn’t out there. All those precious moments are still there somewhere.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“Promise you won't forget me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes - because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient culture and home.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Bye! . . . Love you! . . . Call me!” After she’d hung up, I asked her, “Who was that?” and Gilda said, “Wrong number.”
― Martin Short, I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend

“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”
― Carrie Fisher

“I have to find myself
A place where I can breathe.
That's where poetry lives
In the oldest part of us.”
― Joan London, The Golden Age

“You are the first inhabitant
I meet
In this new country.”
― Joan London, The Golden Age

“I act like someone in a bomb shelter trying to raise everyone’s spirits.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“Movies were meant to stay on the screen, flat and large and colorful, gathering you up into their sweep of story, carrying you rollicking along to the end, then releasing you back into your unchanged life. But this movie misbehaved. It leaked out of the theater, poured off the screen, affected a lot of people so deeply that they required endless talismans and artifacts to stay connected to it.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I had been there before; I knew all about it.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“What a brilliant thing, to discover we’ve been wrong about some things, what a brilliant thing it is to grow.”
― Michaela Coel, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto

“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

“Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round...All the kids tried to grap for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she's fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it is bad to say anything to them.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer