Vanessa > Vanessa's Quotes

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.”
― Anne Rice

“Zhi yin. Jem had told her once that it meant understanding music, and also a bond that went deeper than friendship. Jem played, and he played the years of Will's life as he had seen them. He played two little boys in the training room, one showing the other how to throw knives, and he played the ritual of parabatai: the fire and the vows and burning runes. He played two young men running through the streets of London in the dark, stopping to lean up against a wall and laugh together. He played the day in the library when he and Will had jested with Tessa about ducks, and he played the train to Yorkshire on which Jem had said that parabatai were meant to love each other as they loved their own souls. He played that love, and he played their love for Tessa, and hers for them, and he played Will saying, In your eyes I have always found grace. He played the too few times he had seen them since he had joined the Brotherhood- the brief meetings at the Institute; the time when Will had been bitten by a Shax demon and nearly died, and Jem had come from the Silent City and sat with him all night, risking discovery and punishment. And he played the birth of their first son, and the protection ceremony that had been carried out on the child in the Silent City. Will would have no other Silent Brother but Jem perform it. And Jem played the way he had covered his scarred face with his hands and turned away when he'd found out the child's name was James.
He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears. Jem set down his bow, and came toward the bed, drawing back his hood, so she could see his closed eyes and his scarred face. And he had sat down beside them on the bed, and taken Will's hand, the one that Tessa was not holding, and both Will and Tessa heard Jem's voice in their minds.
I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace.
Will had opened the blue eyes that had never lost their color over all the passing years, and looked at Jem and then Tessa, and smiled, and died, with Tessa's head on his shoulder and his hand in Jem's.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“Von den Sternen kommen wir, zu den Sternen gehen wir. Das Leben ist nur eine Reise in die Fremde.”
― Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books

“I now understood the secret of music and knew what makes it so infinitely superior to all the other arts: its incorporeality. Once it has left an instrument it becomes its own master, a free and independent creature of sound, weightless, incorporeal and perfectly in tune with the universe.”
― Walter Moers

“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

“What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I’ve always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted—like all orphans—to be the object of someone’s affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat.

Whatever be the case, life pains me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“PROMETHEUS: 'Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers”
― Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual”
― Virginia Woolf

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art”
― Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935

“By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”
― Virginia Woolf

“...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I didn't belong as a kid, and that always bothered me. If only I'd known that one day my differentness would be an asset, then my early life would have been much easier.”
― Bette Midler

“ The dark is generous.
Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from the truths of others.
The dark protects us from what we dare not know.
Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in the day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it’s the day that is temporary.
Day is the illusion.
Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.
With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.


The dark is generous, and it is patient.
It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.
The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.
The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.
The dark’s patience is infinite.
Eventually, even stars burn out.


The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.
It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.


The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.”
― Matthew Stover

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed.”
― Robert Frost

“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.”
― Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Work is always an antidote to depression.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt