Ben Burdick > Ben's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“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

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.”
― Pablo Neruda

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.”
― Pablo Neruda

“I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“The only way love can last a lifetime is if it's unconditional. The truth is this: love is not determined by the one being loved but rather by the one choosing to love.”
― Stephen Kendrick, The Love Dare

“After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Love Jo all your days, if you choose, but don't let it spoil you, for it's wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can't have the one you want.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Is this idea of the non-fruit bearing Christian something that we have concocted in order to make Christianity 'easier?' ...so that we can follow our own course while still calling ourselves followers of Christ?”
― Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

“What will survive of us is love.

- from A Writer”
― Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”
― Philip Larkin

“I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.

Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea --
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me.”
― Sarah Teasdale

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It's best to know what your issues are before going ahead with a relationship.”
― Susan Wiggs, Summer by the Sea

“Pop, why didn't you ever marry again?"

"I was a good husband to your mother," Pop said. "I would not be a good husband to another woman. It would not be fair, because I gave everything I had to my first marriage. Love is like that for some people.”
― Susan Wiggs, Summer by the Sea

“He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Lord, when I feel that what I'm doing is insignificant and unimportant, help me to remember that everything I do is significant and important in your eyes, because you love me and you put me here, and no one else can do what I am doing in exactly the way I do it.”
― Brennan Manning, Souvenirs of Solitude: Finding Rest in Abba's Embrace