Ast > Ast's Quotes

“Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I think all the good parts of us are connected on some level. The part that shares the last double chocolate chip cookie or donates to charity or gives a dollar to a street musician or becomes a candy striper or cries at Apple commercials or says I love you or I forgive you. I think that's God. God is the connection of the very best parts of us.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“Touching him is order and chaos, like being assembled and disassembled at the same time.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“And what about the lovers who spend hours staring into each other's eyes? Is it a display of trust? I will let you in close and trust you not to hurt me while I'm in this vulnerable position. And if trust is one of the foundations of love, perhaps the staring is a way to build or reinforce it. Or maybe it's simpler than that.
A simple search for connection.
To see.
To be seen.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“I could stay here forever interrupting our talking with kissing, interrupting our kissing with talking.”
― Nicola Yoon

“Dark matter is love. It's the attracting force.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“I birth babies, I end lives. I dance it out. I wear the white hat. I operate. I gladiate. I exonerate. I spin yarns and tell tall tales and sit around the campfire. I wrap myself in fiction. Fiction is my job. Fiction is it. Fiction is everything. Fiction is my jam.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”
― Francis Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.”
― Dean Koontz, Innocence

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a specific person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise