Kathryn > Kathryn's Quotes

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“You may forget but
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us”
― Sappho, The Art of Loving Women

“Love shook my heart
Like the wind on the mountain
rushing over the oak trees.”
― Sappho

“Although only breath, words which I command are immortal.”
― Sappho

“The gleaming stars all about the shining moon
Hide their bright faces, when full-orbed and splendid
In the sky she floats, flooding the shadowed earth
with clear silver light.
”
― Sappho

“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: Includes eBook, Library Edition

“Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're supposed to be civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Regrets are illuminations come too late.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“No. You surpass us all." Beside me she looked colorless and frail. "You are like a living rose among wax flowers. We may last forever, but you bloom brighter and smell sweeter, and draw blood with your thorns.”
― Margaret Rogerson, An Enchantment of Ravens

“Once again love drives me on, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.”
― Sappho

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“What is a miracle if not the manifestation of light where darkness is expected?”
― Leigh Ann Henion, Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World

“I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns—small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence—and lasted about ten seconds.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“I liked myself this way, it was such a relief to be free of disguises an prettiness and attractiveness. Above all that horrible, false, debilitating attractiveness that women hide behind. I puled my hat down over my ears so that they stuck out beneath it. 'I must remember this whn I get back. I must not fall into that trap again.' I must let people see me as I am. Like this? Yes, why not like this. But then I realized hat the rules pertaining to one set of circumstances do not necessarily pertain to another. Back there, this would just be another disguise. Back there, there was no nakedness, no one could afford it. Everyone had their social personae well fortified...”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“So I had made a decision which carried with it things that I could not articulate at the time. I had made the choice instinctively, and only later had given it meaning. The trip had never been billed in my mind as an adventure in the sense of something to be proved. And it struck me then that the most difficult things has been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity -- and the fears were paper tigers. One really could do anything one had decided to do whether it were changing a job, moving to a new place, divorcing a husband or whatever,m one really cold act to change and control one's life;and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“One continues to learn things in life, then promptly forget them.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback

“The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. ‘Watch out, be careful, watch.’ ‘Don’t climb trees, don’t dirty your dress, don’t accept lifts from strange men. Listen but don’t learn, you won’t need it.’ And so the snail’s antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness. And”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback

“It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451