Freda > Freda's Quotes

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
― Bob Dylan

“Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles;
Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.
Courage breeds creativity; Cowardice represses fear and is mastered by it.
Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?
Expediency ask the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular?

But conscience ask the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Moments, when lost, can't be found again. They're just gone.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“Mistakes are a fact of life: It is the response to the error that counts.”
― Nikki Giovanni

“It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought—that is to be educated."

[Saturday Evening Post, September 27, 1958]”
― Edith Hamilton

“Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive. ”
― Havelock Ellis

“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“We all didn't come into to the world at the same time so it makes sense that we don't leave it at the same time.”
― Lurlene McDaniel, Too Young to Die

“Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.”
― Jodi Picoult

“Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.”
― Ann Brashares

“Because I thought I was in love. And when you think you're in love, you are willing to stick it out and make it work until it is love.”
― Becca Fitzpatrick, Hush, Hush

“I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.”
― Louis L'Amour, Sackett's Land

“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr

“All paradises, all utopias are defined by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]”
― Toni Morrison

“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“In character, in manner, in style, in all the things, the supreme excellence is simplicity”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Favorite Poems

“Do what you love, think what you feel and live the way you want.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Quote Me Everyday

“It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"

I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.

"Because, he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“You have some queer friends, Dorothy,' she said.

The queerness doesn't matter, so long as they're friends,' was the answer”
― L. Frank Baum, The Road to Oz

“It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be...”
― Bob Dylan

“There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League

“No more memories, no more silent tears. No more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye.”
― Andrew Lloyd Webber