Faz > Faz's Quotes

“it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It's hard to love a woman and do anything.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Love those you hate you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“To belittle, you have to be little.”
― Kahill Gibran, The Prophet

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.”
― Kahill Gibran, The Prophet

“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Given a choice, she would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one doing the persecuting-- both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human.”
― Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River

“I know exactly the potential of the people around here. They have the potential to lie. They have the potential to deceive. They have the potential to inveigle. They’ll change nothing. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie awake thinking, my God! We have so much. We have these huge forests. We have boundless open fields. We can see the deepest, furthest horizons. Look around you. Look. We should be giants. We really, really aren’t.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

“What she can't get into her narrow mind is that we're above such things as love. Our whole aim - the whole sense of our life - is to avoid petty illusions that stop us being free and happy. On, on, on!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

“Life’s all done, just as if I never even lived it ...”
― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

“I like to be admired from afar, and then complimented up close.”
― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Seduction

“The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. “The Last Supper” v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception -– “Blonde on Blonde” might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chance against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30.”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”
― Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch