Anji M > Anji's Quotes

“The ghostly hands of a fitful wind played with her hair. The perfume of June lilies stole in from the bed under the open window---a haunting odour, sweeter than music, like all the lost perfumes of old, unutterably dear years. Far off, two beautiful, slender, black firs, of exactly the same height, came out against the silver dawn-lit sky like the twin spires of some Gothic cathedral rising out of a bank of silver mist. Just between them hung a dim old moon, as beautiful as the evening crescent. Their beauty was a comfort and stimulant to Emily under the stress of the strange vigil. Whatever passed---whatever came---beauty like this was eternal.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Emily's Quest

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.”
― L.M. Montgomery

“I'm not a bit changed--not really. I'm only just pruned down and branched out. The real ME--back here--is just the same.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“Tereza tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would catch her at it, every peek into the mirror had a tinge of secret vice.
It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amaze­ment at seeing her own "I." She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face. She forgot that the nose was merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as the true expression of her nature.
Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occa­sionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“My heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The city had faded my tan, though. I looked yellow as a Chinaman. Ordinarily, I would have been nervous about my dress and my odd colour, but being with Doreen made me forget my worries. I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside-- but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond-- only a glimpse-- and heard a note of unearthly music.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“Children can be the most cruel creatures alive. They have the herd instinct of prejudice against any outsider, and they are merciless in its indulgence.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“Death isn't terrible. The universe is full of love - and spring comes everywhere - and in death you open and shut a door. There are beautiful things on the other side of that door.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“If it be true that we "count time by heart throbs" Emily lived two years in it instead of two days.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“How beautiful it was, lying embowered in the twilight of the old trees; the tips of the loftiest spruces came out in purple silhouette against the north-western sky of rose an amber; down behind it the Blair Water dreamed in silver; the Wind Woman had folded her misty bat-wings in a valley of sunset and stillness lay over the world like a blessing.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“It seemed like a garden where no frost could wither or rough wind blow--a garden remembering a hundred vanished summers.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“But they had found the Tansy Patch a charming place and were glad to go again. For the rest of the vacation there was hardly a day when they did not go up to it-- preferably in the long, smoky, delicious August evenings when the white moths sailed over the tansy plantation and the golden twilight faded into dusk and purple over the green slopes beyond and fireflies lighted their goblin torches by the pond.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays On Poetry and Criticism

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps where "Three o'Clock in the Morning," a neat, sad little waltz of that year, was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I've always thought that when it comes time for one day to end the sun makes its exit from the stage by showing off the most ravishing item of the day-- something of true beauty, something so friendly and large it terrifies me. My thoughts were confirmed on that day.
I felt myself sink into the city. The essence felt pure white, drawing close to me from the western sky like the soft, rosy cheeks of a beloved wife. Every street in town shone with the brightness, and every face radiated the glow--that intense sunset shimming in its redness.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Amrita

“He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume