Jasmine > Jasmine's Quotes

“She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them”.
Geraldine Brooks”
― Geraldine Brooks

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
― James Baldwin

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
― Joan Didion

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
― Joan Didion

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

“...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
― James Baldwin

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Baldwin

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”
― James Baldwin

“She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.”
― George Crane

“Some people believe that an attractive woman cannot stop men falling in love with her; but she can. If she really, in her deepest heart, does not want it, neither will they.”
― Stella Gibbons, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade before the public. ”
― George Crane

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and Other Stories

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

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde