Cora > Cora's Quotes

“Anyhow, she thought, they are aware of each other; they live in each other; what else is love, she asked, listening to their laughter.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Years

“Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.”
― Henry James

“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

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

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
― Emily Jane Brontë , Wuthering Heights

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.”
― Jane Austen

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say.”
― Cees Nooteboom

“Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac”
― Frank O'Hara

“Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.”
― Groucho Marx

“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
― Woody Allen

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.”
― Groucho Marx

“All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.”
― Homer, The Iliad / The Odyssey

“If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
― Virginia Woolf

“People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.”
― Wallace Stevens