Jenn > Jenn's Quotes

“When life seems too cruel, and there seems too little love in it. When you feel you have failed. When you don't know what the point is. When you cannot go on. I want you to draw strength from me then. I want you to remember how much I cherished you, how I lived for you. When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“As we used to say in the mountains, "Breathe. Breathe again. With every breath, you are alive." After all these years, this still the best advice I can give you: Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.”
― Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories

“Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Anyway, time is more than counting days. On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measured in meaning. I better get up for work or It’s time to feed the baby. Or That was the year I got cancer or That is the day we celebrate your birthday. Or Remember when our father died or Let’s remember to plant turnips this spring. It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe.”
― Rene Denfeld

“Things usually work out in the end."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

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

“We all do things we regret. It's part of growing up.”
― Sue Grafton, F is for Fugitive

“Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait.”
― Remarque, Erich Maria Remarque, Erich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”
― Elie Wiesel

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.”
― Paul Terry

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
― Mother Teresa