Anna > Anna's Quotes

“I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...”
― Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials - The Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass

“I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read”
― Elizabeth Knox, Dreamhunter

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

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

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

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“And what have I done?"
What? WHAT?...You've stolen them."
With that, Cornelia fled, but Buttercup understood; she knew who "them" was.
The boys.
The beef-witted featherbrained rattledskulled clodpated dim-domed noodle-noggined sapheaded lunk-knobbed BOYS.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“The other mothers, the teachers, the people. I didn't realize that having a child was so social. You're always talking to people.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“when you didn’t let a woman help, it was a way of keeping her at a distance, of letting her know that she wasn’t family, of saying I don’t like you enough to let you into my kitchen.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“She'd found socializing with the school mums difficult enough when her life was in perfect order. The chat, chat, chat, the swirls of laughter, the warmth, the friendliness (most mums were so very nice) and the gentle hint of bitchiness that ran beneath it all.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you'. I wonder if just enjoying your kids company isn't more important.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.”
― Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

“You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”
― Keri Hulme, The Bone People

“What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“What you'll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.”
― Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang