Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. ”
― C.S. Lewis

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“On the day the tree bloomed in the fall, when its white apple blossoms fell and covered the ground like snow, it was tradition for the Waverleys to gather in the garden like survivors of some great catastrophe, hugging one another, laughing as they touched faces and arms, making sure they were all okay, grateful to have gotten through it.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”
― Cheryl Strayed

“He had altered his method of matching books to readers. He often asked, "How would you like to feel when you go to sleep?" Most of his customers wanted to feel light and safe.

He asked others to tell him about their favorite things. Cooks loved their knives. Estate agents loved the jangle made by a bunch of keys. Dentists loved the flicker of fear in their patients' eyes; Perdu had guessed as much.

Most often he asked, "How should the book taste? Of ice cream? Spicy, meaty? Or like a chilled rose?" Food and books were closely related. He discovered this in Sanary, and it earned him the nickname "the book epicure.”
― Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

“Kästner was one reason I called my book barge the Literary Apothecary,” said Perdu. “I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they are apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.”
― Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

“He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“That is the motto women should constantly repeat over and over again. Good for her! Not for me.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“The only way we will survive is by being kind. The only way we can get by in this world is through the help we receive from others. No one can do it alone, no matter how great the machines are.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“Career is different. Career is the stringing together of opportunities and jobs. Mix in public opinion and past regrets. Add a dash of future panic and a whole lot of financial uncertainty. Career is something that fools you into thinking you are in control and then takes pleasure in reminding you that you aren’t. Career is the thing that will not fill you up and never make you truly whole. Depending on your career is like eating cake for breakfast and wondering why you start crying an hour later.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“Treat your career like a bad boyfriend. Your career wont take care of you. It won't call you back or introduce you to its parents. Your career will openly flirt with other people while you are around.”
― Amy Poehler

“I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.”
― Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby

“The great courageous act that we must all do, is to have the courage to step out of our history and past so that we can live our dreams.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“Don't go through life; grow through life.”
― Eric Butterworth

“The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”
― Mary Oliver

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“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

“I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“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

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
― Anita Desai

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

“How do you know when it's over?"
"Maybe when you feel more in love with your memories than with the person standing in front of you.”
― Gunnar Ardelius, I Need You More Than I Love You and I Love You to Bits

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country