Mourningfower > Mourningfower's Quotes

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“People are always ruining things for you.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.”
― J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“People never notice anything.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds.”
― Libba Bray

“Because you don't notice the light without a bit of shadow. Everything has both dark and light. You have to play with it till you get it exactly right.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“But we can't go back. We can only go forward.”
― Libba Bray

“Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“There are no safe choices. Only other choices.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“And for a moment, I understand that I have friends on this lonely path; that sometimes your place is not something you find, but something you have when you need it.”
― Libba Bray, Rebel Angels

“But aren't many gardens beautiful because they are imperfect?...aren't the strange, new flowers that arise by mistake or misadventure as pleasing as the well-tended and planned?”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“The trouble with morning is that it comes well before noon.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“Sometimes we seek that which we are not yet ready to find.”
― Libba Bray, Rebel Angels

“Eve didn't choose to eat the apple. She was tempted by the serpent."
"Yes," I argue, thoughts coming out half-formed. "But...she didn't have to take a bite. She chose to.”
― Libba Bray

“We create the illusions we need to go on.”
― Libba Bray

“I should never be left alone with my mind for too long.”
― Libba Bray

“No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.
A fissure forms in the vessel. I’m cracking open.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“I am no longer content to be the scared, obedient schoolgirl. Who are you, a stranger, to tell me what I can and cannot do?”
― Libba Bray