Tiffany > Tiffany's Quotes

“...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, 'She wants her cup of stars.'

Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.

'Her little cup,' the mother was explaining, smiling apologetically at the waitress, who was thunderstruck at the thought that the mill's good country milk was not rich enough for the little girl. 'It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.' The waitress nodded, unconvinced, and the mother told the little girl, 'You'll have your milk from your cup of stars tonight when we get home. But just for now, just to be a very good little girl, will you take a little milk from this glass?'

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.”
― Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love

“Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

“It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“The long black nights, when the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid, are not so black. The silence that dwells in the forest is not so black. There is nothing in the world so black as thy hair.”
― Oscar Wilde, Salomé

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“Anne laughed.

"I don't want sunbursts or marble halls, I just want you.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“I wouldn't want to marry anybody who was wicked, but I think I'd like it if he could be wicked and wouldn't.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“I do know my own mind,' protested Anne. 'The trouble is, my mind changes and then I have to get acquainted with it all over again.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faëry lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“Besides, I've been feeling a little blue — just a pale, elusive azure. It isn't serious enough for anything darker.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again.

”
― Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Two Other Plays

“I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ...' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing 'For She's A Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. 'S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“Every weakness contains within itself a strength.”
― Shusaku Endo

“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Here Be Dragons

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.”
― John Grogan, Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog