Ashley > Ashley's Quotes

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
― Sun-Tzu, A Arte da Guerra

“To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Arthur is no fit king. Uther's bastard, Merlin's pawn, he is lowborn and a fool. He is wanton and petty and cruel. A glutton and a drunkard, he lacks all civilized graces. In short, he is a sullen, ignorant brute.
All these things and more men say of Arthur. Let them. When all the words are spoken and the arguements fall exhausted into silence, this single fact remains: we would follow Arthur to the very gates of Hell and beyond if he asked it. And that is the solitary truth.
Show me another who can claim such loyalty.”
― Stephen R. Lawhead, Arthur

“I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“It's funny the things you think you're scared of until they're upon you, and then you're not.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“Travelling's not something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.”
― Gayle Forman , Just One Day

“C'est courageux d'aller dans l'inconnu': It is courageous to go into territory unknown.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don't put yourself in the path of it, you miss it.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“Or maybe it's not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“And that's when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“You have to fall in love to be in love, but falling in love isn't the same as being in love”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action;
and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and I want my grasp of things to be
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing
And are raised to the rank of prince
By the slippery ease of their light judgments
But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst.
You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a hoe.
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
To dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“That's when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they're over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.
They are the meaning.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“So I find words I never thought to speak

In streets I never thought I should revisit

When I left my body on a distant shore.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing---
each stone, blossom, child---
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“The quiet sense of something lost”
― Tennyson

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth