amber > amber's Quotes

“I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.”
― Sherwood Anderson

“We are not all born at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.”
― Mary Austin

“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.”
― Michel Onfray

“The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the god-like stand shoulder to shoulder?”
― Clive Barker

“Where else can bubble-gum hearts, the dream travellers, the serial killers, and the occasional guest-star from beyond the grave occupy the same space?”
― Clive Barker

“A disciple came to the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. “Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake?” And the master of the good name said, “When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a question: whether he knows how to purify your thoughts. If he says that he knows, then he is a fake.”
― Elie Wiesel

“She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.”
― Beverly Cleary, Ramona the Pest

“It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.”
― Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney

“I know of a cure for everything: salt water...in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Karen Blixen

“There is nobility in the struggle, you don't have to win.”
― Sharon Pollock

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.”
― Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us: The Achingly Sensual Political Poetry from a Journalist in El Salvador

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time...give it, give it all, give it now.”
― Annie Dillard

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
― Benjamin Spock

“Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.”
― Anne Frank

“Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.”
― Bill Ayers

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
― Margaret Mead

“Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.”
― Joanne Harris, The Girl with No Shadow

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don't realize it.”
― Dorothea Lange

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever