Mary > Mary's Quotes

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. ”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”
― W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
― Jean de La Fontaine, Fables

“I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it.”
― Jean Kerr, The Snake Has All the Lines

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
― Raymond Chandler, Long Goodbye

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
― William Goldman, Four Screenplays with Essays: Marathon Man - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - The Princess Bride - Misery

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
― Desmond Tutu

“Too many of us are hung up on what we don't have, can't have, or won't ever have. We spend too much energy being down, when we could use that same energy – if not less of it – doing, or at least trying to do, some of the things we really want to do.”
― Terry McMillan , Disappearing Acts

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“Of course motivation is not permanent. But then, neither is bathing; but it is something you should do on a regular basis.”
― Zig Ziglar, Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.”
― Steve Jobs