Carmen > Carmen's Quotes

“You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

“We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win.”
― Edward Gibbon

“‎Though nobody can go back and make a new beginning... Anyone can start over and make a new ending.”
― Chico Xavier

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”
― Wole Soyinka

“I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.”
― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.”
― Tuli Kupferberg

“Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room

“Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.”
― J. G. Ballard, Rushing to Paradise