Nina > Nina's Quotes

“The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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― Iris Murdoch

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.”
― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides

“Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“She thought of herself wondering how he was going to breathe in the coffin and marveled at the stubbornness of mental habits.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“Reader, I ate him.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf