Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
― W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”
― W.H. Auden

“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at.”
― W.H. Auden

“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”
― W.H. Auden

“The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.”
― W. H. Auden

“There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.”
― W.H. Auden

“I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?”
― W.H. Auden

“A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.”
― W.H. Auden

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
― W. H. Auden

“I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.”
― W.H. Auden, Markings: Spiritual Poems and Meditations

“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“He takes my hand. Intertwines our fingers. Offers me a smile that manages to kiss my heart.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“My words wear no parachutes as they fall out of my mouth.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving