Hannah M > Hannah's Quotes

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There are so many pieces to a person. So many small stories and so few opportunities to read them. 'I would like to look at you' seems like such an awkward request.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“This one half hour had given to each the same precious certainty of being beloved.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.”
― Stephen King , The Dark Tower

“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.”
― Margaret Atwood

“...each one's different. They have similar elements, though. All stories do, no matter what form they take. Something was, and then something changed. Change is what story is, after all.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”

“It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“It occurred to him that strength was quite different from toughness and that being vulnerable wasn't quite the same as being weak.”
― Michelle Magorian, Goodnight Mister Tom

“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I knew, you would do me good, in some way, at some time;- I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not- (again he stopped)- did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. ”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure to not dishonor me.”

“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.”
― Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Because when you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire