Laura Levada > Laura's Quotes

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
― L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“THERE is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.”
― Bliss Carman

“On the shining yards of heaven
See a wider dawn unfurled. . . .
The eternal slaves of beauty
Are the masters of the world.”
― Bliss Carman, Songs from Vagabondia

“Soul meets soul on lovers lips.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I am only one, but I am one. I can't do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do. And by the grace of God, I will.”
― Edward Everett Hale

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Autumn...the year's last, loveliest smile."

[Indian Summer]”
― John Howard Bryant

“Some people don't like you just because your strength reminds them of their weakness. Don't let the hate slow you down.”
― Thema Davis

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”
― Winston Churchill

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”
― Mason Cooley

“A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.”
― Mason Cooley

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars, to change the world.”
― Harriet Tubman

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

“Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masked and costumed figures go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.

All sing in a minor key
Of all-conquering love and careless fortune
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight.

The still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
Which gives the birds to dream in the trees
And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy,
The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.”
― Paul Verlaine, Fêtes galantes

“Celtic 'is a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come . . . Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.”
― J. R. R. Tolkien

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.”
― Mary McLeod Bethune

“Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.”
― Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book