Rosie > Rosie's Quotes

“If you are falling....dive.”
― Joseph Campbell

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman

“All religions are true but none are literal.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“Myth is what we call other people's religion.”
― Joseph Campbell

“All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.”
― Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
― John F. Kennedy

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”
― Joseph Campbell

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“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

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. ”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life: Stories

“I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.”
― Lorrie Moore

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
― Milan Kundera

“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.”
― Zadie Smith

“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”
― Zadie Smith , White Teeth

“There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.”
― George Gordon Byron