Brian H > Brian's Quotes

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”
― Peter Jackson, The Art of The Return of the King

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?”
― Mary Shelley

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.”
― Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice

“Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age.”
― André Aciman

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have.”
― André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

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

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I know it will be difficult,” Henry says. “I … It’s terrifying. And if you’d asked me a year ago, I probably would have said it was fine, that nobody needs to know. But … I’m as much a person and a part of this family as you. I deserve to be happy as much as any of you do. And I don’t think I ever will be if I have to spend my whole life pretending.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“He smiled when he didn't want to. He would do anything just to make other people feel better.”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“Tattie-bogle believed that better things, brighter lights, bigger laughs were always happening to women who had no children.”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“He wanted to sink beneath the surface and never come up again”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The Jacobeans had a sure grasp of catastrophe. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. I felt they cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things-- naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror-- are too terrible to really ever grasp at all.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“People don't pay attention to ninety percent of what they see.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it. A poor man who wishes to rise above his station is only making himself needlessly miserable. And the wise poor have always known this, the same as do the wise rich.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia.”
― Donna Tartt

“I envied them, and found them attractive”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History