Rachel > Rachel's Quotes

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Potential has a shelf life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
― Cornelia Funke

“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Terror made me cruel . . .”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.”
― Shannon Alder

“Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”
― Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

“The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?”
― Edgar Lee Masters

“Act well your part,
there all the honor lies.”
― Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”
― Edna Ferber, So Big

“To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;

Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;

The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.

It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth."

- A poem called DIGGING.”
― Edward Thomas, Collected Poems: Edward Thomas

“The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.”
― Edward Thomas

“I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…

The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.

The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.”
― Edward Thomas

“Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.”
― Edward Thomas

“The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.”
― Edward Thomas

“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”
― Leonora Carrington

“Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward"...
Ecclesiastes 9:9 (NASB)”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: New American Standard Version, NASB

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?

4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.

5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.

6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.

7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.

11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
― Ecclesiast

“But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion.
Ecclesiastes 9:4”
― ESV Bible

“Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.”
― Brian Jacques, Taggerung

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert