Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
― William Goldman, Four Screenplays with Essays: Marathon Man - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - The Princess Bride - Misery

“To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.”
― Nick Hornby, Not a Star

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings”
― John Gillespie MaGee Jr.

“The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”
― John Wooden, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

“As for dying we can only assay that once; we are all apprentices when it comes to that”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“If thou of fortune be bereft,
and in thy store there be but left
two loaves, sell one, and with the
dole, buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…”
― David Attenborough

“Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Dwarves of Death

“Hear my wife speak of John Lewis and you might picture a stately pleasure dome of ornamental cascades and hanging gardens, staffed by muscular Centaurs who know all there is to know about kitchenware and soft furnishings. But really it's just a big hall full of wanky chrome fridges.”
― Tim Moore, You are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain

“She says she prays to God to strike Hitler dead. Cannot help thinking if God wanted to do that he would not have waited till Mrs. Helm asked him to do so.”
― Nella last, Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49

“He said, “Miss Tiffany, the witch… would you be so good as to tell me: what is the sound of love?”

Tiffany looked at his face. The noise from the tug-of-war was silenced. The birds stopped singing. In the grass, the grasshoppers stopped rubbing their legs together and looked up. The earth moved slightly as even the chalk giant (perhaps) strained to hear, and the silence flowed over the world until all there was was Preston, who was always there.

And Tiffany said, “Listen.”
― Terry Pratchett

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“I shouldn't think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ”
― Elizabeth Stone

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“As I reach the end of the book my hope is that it will help popularise bird sound identification. During one of the long sessions of working together, Magnus asked to define what I meant by popularise. „I would like to be able to talk to someone other than you about it, Magnus”.”
― Mark Constantine, The Sound Approach to Birding: A Guide to Understanding Bird Sound [With 2 CDs]