Anna Cf > Anna Cf's Quotes

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
― C.S. Lewis

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins

“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others.”
― Tom Robbins

“Conversation between a princess and an outlaw:
"If I stand for fairy-tale balls and dragon bait--dragon bait--what do you stand for?"
"Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night."
"Franky, it seems to me that you've turned yourself into a stereotype."
"You may be right. I don't care. As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve."
"Well, you may get off on being a beautiful stereotype, regardless of the social consequences, but my conscience won't allow it."
"And I goddamn refuse to be dragon bait. I'm as capable of rescuing you as you are of rescuing me."
"I'm an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.”
― Tom Robbins

“Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.”
― Tom Robbins

“To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“But do we know how to make love stay?'
I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light.

For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irritable; the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside.

Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine thousand pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Don't confuse symmetry with balance.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“. . . maybe that's what life's all about: there's a lof of despair, but also the odd moments of beauty, where time is no longer the same . . . [like] something suspended . . . an elsewhere . . . an always within a never.
Yes, that's is, an always within a never.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.”
― Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems... But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night..You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me... You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works