Ella > Ella's Quotes

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”
― William Faulkner

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“My mother is a fish.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“If time and space were in fact entwined along the loop of relativity, how then could anyone ever reach a point of no return? Were not all such points contrivance? Therefore meaningless? So, again, what was the point?
Not to return.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“But what I do I do because I like to do.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”
― Henry James, The art of fiction