L > L's Quotes

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“يا عالم الغيبِ! ذنبي أنتَ تعرفُه
وأنت تعلمُ إعلاني.. وإسراري
وأنتَ أدرى بإيمانٍ مننتَ به
علي.. ما خدشته كل أوزاري
أحببتُ لقياكَ.. حسن الظن يشفع لي
أيرتُجَى العفو إلاّ عند غفَّارِ؟ .”
― غازي القصيبي

“He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”
― Anais Nin, Henry & June

“I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.”
― Dodie Smith (Cassandra Mortmain, I Capture the Castle), I Capture the Castle

“for she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through —the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form,”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“If only he could be alone in his room working, he thought, among his books. That was where he felt at his ease.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“If we’re not wanting, we’re waiting. Waiting for what, we don’t know, but something and it’s going to happen soon.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: A User's Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind

“To one visitor Alexandrian life was “just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god.” —HESIOD”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“It's easy to mistake being innocent for being simpleminded or naive. We all want to seem sophisticated; we all want to seem street-smart. To be innocent is to be "out of it."

Yet there is a deep truth in innocence. A baby looks in his mother's eyes, and all he sees is love. As innocence fades away, more complicated things take its place. We think we need to outwit others and scheme to get what we want. We begin to spend a lot of energy protecting ourselves. Then life turns into a struggle. People have no choice but to be street-smart. How else can they survive?

When you get right down to it, survival means seeing things the way they really are and responding. It means being open. And that's what innocence is. It's simple and trusting like a child, not judgmental and committed to one narrow point of view. If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never fades.”
― Michael Jackson, Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections

“One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

“but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

“Why does Samuel Butler say, “Wise men never say what they think of women”? Wise men never say anything else apparently.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

“Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“human beings are very narcissistic, they like to see themselves everywhere and be the foil for the rest of creation’ (I, iv).”
― Ritchie Robertson, Goethe: A Very Short Introduction

“Art imitates nature, but does not copy it.”
― Ritchie Robertson, Goethe: A Very Short Introduction

“So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf and dumb to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of the leaves of a tree. Then she woke up. It was still being fabricated.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“It kills me sometimes, how people die.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief