Malory > Malory's Quotes

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Everything is true at once. Life is a contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“The moment his hand closed about the stone, light blazed from it again, raying out through his fingers. For the first time Tessa saw that he had a design on the back of his hand, drawn there as if in black ink. It looked like an open eye. "As for the temperature of Hell, Miss Gray," he said, "let me give you a piece of advice. The handsome young fellow who's trying to rescue you from a hideous fate it never wrong. Not even if he says the sky is purple and made of hedgehogs.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Protection and power are overrated. I think you are very wise to choose happiness and love.”
― Uncle Iroh

“There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be underconstant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway."
"But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?"...
"That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“I feel infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.”
― Nico Neruda, Toni Morrison: 365 Beautiful and Uplifting Quotes for Daily Reading

“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”
― Michelangelo

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”
― Henry Ford

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle”
― Bruce Van Horn, You CAN Go the Distance! Marathon Training Guide: Advice, Plans & Motivation for All Runners

“When you're in your darkest place, you give yourself hope and that's inner strength.”
― Uncle Iroh

“To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can't always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving... you will come to a better place.”
― Uncle Iroh

“Sometimes the best way to solve your own problems is to help someone else”
― Uncle Iroh

“Are you so busy fighting you cannot see your own ship has set sail?”
― Uncle Iroh

“While it is always best to believe in oneself, a little help from others can be a great blessing.”
― — Uncle Iroh in Avatar: The Last Airbender

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun