Carrie > Carrie's Quotes

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud...”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Brigan," she said, annoyed that he had not understood.
"I’ll always be beautiful. Look at me. I have one hundred and sixty two bug bites, and has it made me any less beautiful? I’m missing two fingers and I have scars all over, but does anyone care? No! It just makes me more interesting! I’ll always be like this, stuck in this beautiful form, and you’ll have to deal with it."
He seemed to sense that she expected a grave response, but for the moment, he was incapable. "I suppose it’s a burden I must bear," he said, grinning.”
― Kristin Cashore, Fire

“It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter--and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.

HUCK FINN.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
"After all this time?"
"Always," said Snape.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“You’re crying.”
“I’m not.”
“Right,” he said mildly. “I suppose you got rained on.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“You can't pray a lie" Huck Finn”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under.”
― Karen White, The Beach Trees

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“He accused me of being Dumbledore's man through and through."
"How very rude of him."
"I told him I was."
Dumbledore opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Fawkes the phoenix let out a low, soft, musical cry. To Harry's intense embarrassment, he suddenly realized that Dumbledore's bright blue eyes looked rather watery, and stared hastily at his own knee. When Dumbledore spoke, however, his voice was quite steady.
"I am very touched, Harry.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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

“How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“Who is Malala? I am Malala and this is my story.”
― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way...I can't apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to... We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful...We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“...when truths disappear, they leave behind blank spaces, and that is also dangerous.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“I'm afraid of plenty of things," he said. "I just do them anyway.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights