Alexandra > Alexandra's Quotes

“...for a girl with eyes like hers has a will and is not ruled by anyone but a lover.”
― Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase

“But I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

“In one of those stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night. And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend...I shall not leave you.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.

I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there.

I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.

These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”
― Mother Teresa

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“This is a good place," he said.
"There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I am looking for friends. What does that mean -- tame?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"To establish ties?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Isabel had firm views on moral proximity and the obligations it created. WE cannot choose the situations in which we become involved in this life; we are caught up in them whether we like it or not. If one encounters the need for another, because of who one happens to be, or where one happens to find oneself, and one is in a position to help, then one should do so. It was as simple as that. ”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, 'That wasn't why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?”
― Jack Kerouac

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Just like a murderer jumps out of nowhere in an alley, love jumped out in front of us and struck us both at once”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“No, sir. Go to hell sir. It's the best I can do for you sir.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“Wild roses are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art.”
― Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase

“Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.”
― Jack London

“There is room in history for all of us.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“My witness is the empty sky.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Manuscripts do not burn.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, 'This isn't supposed to be happening this way,' and trying harder to make it happen some other way.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh