Gill > Gill's Quotes

“The doors leading to the past are never fully closed, Adrian would say later. But their positions change all the time and you can never predict where they will be and so it is impossible to prepare yourself before you arrive at this gateway or that, unsure if there is any other way of getting in.”
― Steve Sem-Sandberg, De utvalda

“Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting." by Primo Levi in Drowned”
― Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”
― Carol Shields, The Republic of Love

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“I often wonder if the bill is yet to be presented during our lifetime. If not, I must present it to myself.”
― Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr im neuen Jahrhundert: 2001-2011

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams

“And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.”
― Tim Winton, Breath

“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“It seemed to me that if the lawyers failed to do their duty, they ought to pay people for waiting upon them, instead of making them pay for it.”
― Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Lorna Doone

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”
― Wislawa Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading

“The Revolution of 1848 found all the Rougons on the lookout, frustrated by their bad luck, and ready to use any means necessary to advance their cause. They were a family of bandits lying in wait, ready to plunder and steal.”
― Émile Zola, The Fortune of the Rougons

“The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

“A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

“It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

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

“Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else. ”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore.”
― Thea Dorn

“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”
― Gunter Grass

“So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.”
― William Faulkner

“What does reading do, You can learn almost everything from reading, But I read too, So you must know something, Now I'm not so sure, You'll have to read differently then, How, The same method doesn't work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters, Unless, Unless what, Unless those rivers don't have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching.”
― Jose Saramago, The Cave

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening