Erin Langley > Erin's Quotes

“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.”
― Robert Hass, Time and Materials

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.”
― Paulo Coelho

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
― Raymond Carver

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
― Albert Camus

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“What day is it?” asked Pooh.
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.”
― A.A. Milne

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”
― Seamus Heaney

“All I know is a door into the dark”
― Seamus Heaney

“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
― W.E.B. DuBois

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
― Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold

“Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
― Aldo Leopold

“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
― Bell Hooks