Elle > Elle's Quotes

“Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.”
― Elizabeth Berg, True to Form

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For the next week that was all I heard - manana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
― William Butler Yeats

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.”
― Roald Dahl

“I shall never have a bath again," I said.
"Just dont have one too often," my grandmother said. "Once a month is quite enough for a sensible child." It was at times like these that I loved my grandmother more than ever.”
― Roald Dahl

“She is proof that there is nothing that cannot happen to someone. That the world doesn't need permission, that there is no novel evil it won't embrace.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“...the world is a blade and dread is hope cut open and spread inside out.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“The fault lies not with the mob, who demands nonsense, but with those who do not know how to produce anything else.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Until death it is all life”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“It falls to you, Sancho, if you wish to take revenge for the affront committed against your donkey; I shall assist you from here with helpful words and advice.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“...mountains breed learned men and shepherds' huts house philosophers.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“...let his sin be his punishment, let him eat it with his bread, and let that be an end to it.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“[He] is not going to exit to applause, even if the entire human race should favor him.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Nothing flows from her, vile rabble.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”
― Roseanne Barr

“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“What unknown abilities had filled this void? Was the world somehow brighter, more tangible, without the nagging interference of language? Was the absence of words actually a form of freedom? I've often tried to quiet that constant voice in my mind, to try to experience the world the way they might—but always the questions rush in faster than I can carve out a moment of true silence.”
― Eli Horowitz, The Silent History

“I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”
― Ernest Cline

“...I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly, but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt. I tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me, just enough to warn other women with. But I knew this was unlikely; when the process was complete I wouldn't have anything left to complain with, it wouldn't hurt anymore, I wouldn't remember.”
― Miranda July

“Thus he died, and all the life struggled out of him;
and as he died he spattered me with the dark red
and violent driven rain of bitter-savored blood
to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers
of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.”
― Aeschylus, Aeschylus: The Oresteia

“On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d'abord et longtemps, tout rivage.

(One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.)”
― André Gide, The Counterfeiters

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“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