Jenny > Jenny's Quotes

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“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

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“Because, on reflection, once you have seen your own face and recognized the color of your eyes, tasted the air and smelled the soil, drunk from the purest fountains and the dirtiest wells, that is the kindest thing you can say abut life. It's not nothing.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

“I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: 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 to us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

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

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“Words are like stories ... They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.”
― Vivek Shanbhag, Ghachar Ghochar

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

“Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

“Even on the sad days, when you have to process young children or those leaving lovers behind, you come to realise that every death is significant, even when every life appears not to be.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich