Kyra > Kyra's Quotes

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”
― Virginia Woolf

“There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”
― Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”
― Virginia Woolf

“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“No woman who had been intimate with a god was easily disturbed.”
― Michael Cadnum

“Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.”
― Carson McCullers

“There was none of the quiet insolence about this man.”
― Carson McCullers

“He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“Time is an illusion.”
― Albert Einstein

“Never waste a minute thinking about people you don't like.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
― Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

“Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men