Yu Liu > Yu's Quotes

“Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“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

“Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.”
― Harlan Coben, Promise Me

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“We never know the quality of someone else's life, though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgement.”
― Tami Hoag, Dark Horse

“Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.
(- to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918)”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“...against my will, my fate,
A throne unsettled, and an infant state,
Bid me defend my realms with all my pow'rs, And guard with these severities my shores.”
― Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League

“He was somewhat of a loner by temperament--because though never wholly happy when alone, he was usually slightly more miserable when with other people.”
― Colin Dexter, The Wench is Dead

“The greatest enthusiasts for Civil War history and memory often displace complicated consequences by endlessly focusing on the contest itself. We sometimes lift ourselves out of historical time, above the details, and render the war safe in a kind of national Passover offering as we view a photograph of the Blue and Gray veterans shaking hands across the stone walls at Gettysburg. Deeply embedded in an American mythology of mission, and serving as a mother lode of nostalgia for antimodernists and military history buffs, the Civil War remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
― Jane Austen, Emma