Ana > Ana's Quotes

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one'.... (The man who first said that) was probably a coward.... He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“War is not won by victory.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn't any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Krystal’s slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties concerned.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

“Stone dead," said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

“When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Every letter was a love letter.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older."

"Why's that?" the girl asked.

"It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“What matters to you defines your mattering.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson