Aleea > Aleea's Quotes

“Love is the highest and best use of a life.”
― Sy Montgomery, How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

“I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“How do you explain to someone else why a thing matters to you if it doesn’t matter to them? How can you put into words how a book slips inside of you and becomes a part of you so much that your life feels empty without it?”
― Alan Gratz, Ban This Book

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Culture isn’t necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water. It’s also true that with bread and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: nothing significant distinguishes them then from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.”
― Antonio Iturbe, La bibliotecaria de Auschwitz

“I realized that I was fortunate. To be able to run freely and unencumbered on difficult trails in Appalachia was a gift. “I am living the dream. I am living the dream!” I screamed to any tree that would listen. Here I was, huffing, puffing, and whining inwardly about something I had chosen to do of my own volition, about something I had the physical ability to complete. I made a silent promise to all my family members who had mobility issues, and to those who had heart disease and diabetes, that I wouldn’t forget this. I was able. I was strong, and this little bit of suffering I could stand—for their sake.”
― Mirna Valerio, A Beautiful Work In Progress

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“Did you have a plan?"

"I thought adrenaline would take over but it did not.”
― N.D. Stevenson, Lumberjanes, Vol. 2: Friendship to the Max

“I am different, not less.”
― Temple Grandin

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
― Jane Goodall

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
― Jane Goodall

“There is still a beauty about simply doing the difficult thing that I will never be good at, for the pure pleasure of having engaged in the process.”
― Mirna Valerio, A Beautiful Work In Progress

“I learned to accept not finishing a particular event as a mode of self-care and injury prevention.”
― Mirna Valerio, A Beautiful Work In Progress

“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 reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“The only good cage is an empty cage.”
― Lawrence Anthony, The Elephant Whisperer

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice