Sandra > Sandra's Quotes

“I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“... but she was also bewilderingly lonely... Abra had lost her gift for being alone.”
― John Steinbeck

“It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.

But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uh-huh, not knowing what you're doing - separating deeds from the words that define them - was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say "I didn't mean it" was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved ALis of the world. Could that be so? Obviously, no. No, it simply could not. Many people would say that even a genuine act of repentance could not atone for a crime, much less this unexplained blankness - an infinitely lesser excuse, a mere assertion of ignorance that wouldn't even register on any scale of regret.”
― Salman Rushdie

“I'm not close to him." He looked at me defiantly. "But he's put his whole life into this. He's no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he's doing something important and I respect his dedication - maybe even more because he's just an ordinary man trying to do a great man's work, while the great men are all busy making bombs.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
― Steven Wright

“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“How can I make him understand that he did not create me?
He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don't understand there are human feelings involved.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.”
― Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

“They were students of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they came out and read the nature of the sin.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath