Jemimah > Jemimah's Quotes

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot

“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“There's always world enough and time.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“When they launch snakes you'll have your namesake.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“ironic kebabs.”
― David Nicholls, Us

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
― Italo Calvino

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.”
― Cyril Wong, The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“As your lover describes you, so you are.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“I don't want realism. I want magic!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.”
― thomas hardy

“It's my heart that is tired. A thirteen-year-old heart shouldn't feel like this.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”
― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993