Paula > Paula's Quotes

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
― Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice

“Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo
Ipse domi stimul ac nummos contemplar in arca.
(The public hiss at me, but I cheer myself when in my own house I contemplate the coins in my strong-box.)”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
― Jane Austen

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell

“Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“Youth is the age of despairs.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no more
Of dumps so dull and heavy.
The fraud of men was ever so
Since summer first was leafy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey, nonny, nonny.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man. He that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“When you depart from me sorrow abides and happiness takes his leave.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Why, i' faith, methinks she's too low for a high
praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little
for a great praise: only this commendation I can
afford her, that were she other than she is, she
were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I
do not like her. (Benedick, from Much Ado About Nothing)”
― William Shakespeare

“Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much. Lady, as you are mine, I am yours: I give away myself for
you and dote upon the exchange.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Dante's Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn't be avoided, Lowell said, but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.”
― Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours—arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I never change, except in my affections.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest