Suzannah > Suzannah's Quotes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Everything in this book may be wrong.”
― Richard Bach, Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul

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

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”
― John Cheever

“It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
― John Wooden

“they were looking for housekeepers and cooks, and I was dying to get out of Australia and see the rest of the world. It's a Sagittarius thing, you know. We just move on and on, like tumbleweeds.”
― Roxanne St. Claire, Tropical Getaway

“I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer, will now acquire the form and substance of the real. We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end.

And after Pisces? Out of the womb, the bloody birth. We do not follow: we cannot cross from last to first. Aries will not admit a collective point of view, and Taurus will not relinquish the subjective. Gemini's code is an exclusive one. Cancer seeks a source, Leo, a purpose, and Virgo, a design; but these are projects undertaken singly. Only in the zodiac's second act will we begin to show ourselves: in Libra, as a notion, in Scorpio, as a quality, and in Sagittarius, as a voice. In Capricorn we will gain memory, and in Aquarius, vision; it is only in Pisces, the last and oldest of the zodiacal signs, that we acquire a kind of selfhood, something whole. But the doubled fish of Pisces, that mirrored womb of self and self-awareness, is an ourobouros of mind—both the will of fate, and the fated will—and the house of self-undoing is a prison built by prisoners, airless, door-less, and mortared from within.

These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White

“Come in and be undeniable. When you're doing excellent work, you have something to stand on.”
― Joy Ofodu

“How liberating it is to pursue wholeness instead of perfection.”
― Morgan Harper Nichols

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Don't ask me why trans women give too much, why we too extra, why we shake our boobs, why we wear our hair down toward the ground. Why we wear too much makeup. Cuz I don't know my expiration date, baby. So I gotta make a legacy that's gonna last long. I gotta give you something that's gonna make you remember me. Just in case they don't say my name, I say my name.”
― Alonda Talley

“What's the good of living if you don't try a few things?”
― Charles M. Schulz

“It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.”
― John Guare, Landscape of the Body

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King