Martha > Martha's Quotes

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“...Now did you ever hear of a young feller's having such hard luck, Mrs. Burden?"

Grandma told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he didn't realize that he was being protected by Providence.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“But, ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“It's the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“What one says hardly matters, only the trust with which it is said, the sympathy with which it is received.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed - begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it - I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“Dreams are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“If you are not admired no one will take the trouble to disapprove.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“It was like the time he'd failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“To hell with all that, began the Sheriff, and was again interrupted by Mrs. Buster, who said that under no circumstances would she tolerate swearing: will we Reverend? and the Reverend, backing her up, said he'd be damned if they would.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“Preacher spit on the ground and swaggered over to Billy Bob. Come on, he said, just as though nothing had happened, She's a hard one, she is, she don't want nothing but to make trouble between two good friends. For a moment it looked as if Billy Bob was going to join him in a peaceful togetherness; but suddenly, coming to his senses, he drew back and made a gesture. The boys regarded each other a full minute, all the closeness between them turning an ugly color: you can't hate so much unless you love, too.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“She saw her sitting with her son in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not though of them more than once all that time. How eventful her own life had been, during those same years. Yet perhaps Carrie Manning had not thought about her either. The thought was strange and distasteful.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is no that of a man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.”
― E.M. Forster

“She hated war and liked soldiers—it was one of her amiable inconsistencies.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End