Cynthia > Cynthia's Quotes

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#1

“Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. ”
― Gertrude Stein

tags: humour

429 likes

#2

“If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”
― Gertrude Stein

279 likes

#3

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein

tags: genius, humor

2182 likes

#4

“You look ridiculous if you dance
You look ridiculous if you don't dance
So you might as well
dance.”
― Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

tags: carpe-diem, dancing, life

378 likes

#5

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

tags: books, power-of-words, reading

26910 likes

#6

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

tags: dying, facts, fame, knowing, love, poverty, reality, school, teach, wealth

18635 likes

#7

“Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

349 likes

#8

“For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

201 likes

#9

“In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're sure. You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don't need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.

In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea.

I liked the Irish way better.”
― C.E. Murphy, Urban Shaman

tags: hospitality, humor, ireland, tea

783 likes

#10

“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch

tags: feminism, ireland, irish, women

607 likes

#11

“THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

tags: beautiful-creatures, found, girl, hungry, ireland, lost, music, sea, song, sound, stargirl, wounds

431 likes

#12

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

tags: cats, humor, women

28796 likes

#13

“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”
― Joseph Conrad, Chance

tags: women

12384 likes

#14

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

tags: freedom, women, writing

12722 likes

#15

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

tags: character, empowerment, flaws, freedom, gender, identity, image, independence, integrity, realism, self-awareness, self-determination, women

13894 likes

#16

“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

tags: empowerment, exploration, feminism, roman-payne, strong-women, the-wanderess, wander, wanderer, wanderess, wandering

1527 likes

#17

“I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
― Ernest Hemingway

tags: a-moveable-feast, love, paris, writing

204 likes

#18

“To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

tags: paris

61 likes

#19

“Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station—the Gare D'Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?”
― Margaret Anderson

39 likes

#20

“Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

tags: beauty, class-struggle, excess, french-revolution, grandeur, louis-xiv, paris, wastefulness

26 likes

#21

“Where's your will to be weird?”
― Jim Morrison

tags: individuality, musicians, weirdness, wierd

1277 likes

#22

“Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders round as ravens claws.”
― Jim Morrison

329 likes

#23

“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.”
― Jim Morrison

tags: poetry

348 likes

#24

“I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.”
― Jim Morrison

tags: jim-morrison

202 likes

#25

“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.”
― George R.R. Martin

tags: dreamers, heroes, perseverance

620 likes

#26

“Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”
― Mark Twain

tags: heroes

308 likes

#27

“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”
― Ernest Hemingway

tags: growing-older, heroes

171 likes

#28

“You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.”
― Paul Gallico

tags: heroes, humanity, villains

96 likes

#29

“Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

tags: catholicism, christianity, culture, culture-critique, heroes, jesus-shock, philosophy, spirituality, theology

128 likes