Quin > Quin's Quotes

“For what it’s worth... it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

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

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I would die for you. But I won't live for you.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn't been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the 'tonic of wildness' as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“If you want to be happy, be.”
― Leo Tolstory

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, "Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery." This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, "My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket."

Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“I wonder if we recognize the irony of telling people to act normal, because to act is to perform a role that isn’t real. And I wonder if we truly understand what it does to a human being to tell them to pretend to be someone, or something, they are not, and how this demand requires people to repress, efface, and cover up who they really are.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“How negative eugenics, as it came to be known, emerged as the focus of the movement is, on one hand, complicated, involving many different fields of science and points of view, all occurring within a context of massive social disruptions. But on the other hand, it’s not complicated at all. We like having people exist lower on the pecking order than we do. And so the great sorting of humans into categories of deficiency gave eugenicists the perfect target: the abnormals and defectives.”
― Jonathan Mooney, Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets