Corinne > Corinne's Quotes

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams, Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Why did it take me so many years to understand that Night is something you can talk to, something that might even decide to watch over you or kiss you just when you're about to crumple from loneliness?”
― Sarah Porter, Vassa in the Night

“A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Thinking something does not make it true. Wanting something does not make it real.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

“Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Giving is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
― Maya Angelou

“No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.”
― haruki murakami

“If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
― Agatha Christie, Peril at End House