Sabina > Sabina's Quotes

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”
― Hermann Broch

“May your love for me be
like
the scent of the evening sea

drifting in
through a quiet window

so i do not have to run
or chase or fall
... to feel you

all i have to do
is
breathe.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“Watch your thoughts, for they will become actions. Watch your actions, for they'll become... habits. Watch your habits for they will forge your character. Watch your character, for it will make your destiny.”
― Margaret Thatcher

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“...there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“We often wait for kindness...but being kind to yourself can start now.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.
Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Senza amore non conosciamo nessun viaggio di esplorazione del mondo, senza amore non giungiamo a conoscere né la morte né il modo di vincerla, cioè non diventiamo consapevoli di essere fatti di tempo limitato e di volerlo donare a qualcuno.”
― Alessandro D'Avenia, Ogni storia è una storia d'amore

“L'amore si accompagna sempre alla paura, perché non abbiamo mai il controllo dell'oggetto amato, seppur abbiamo cominciato a dipendere da lui per la conoscenza di noi stessi.”
― Alessandro D'Avenia, Ogni storia è una storia d'amore

“One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd