Cat {Pemberley and Beyond} > Cat's Quotes

“Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.”
― Honore de Balzac, Le Père Goriot

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise

“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“He would have told her - he would have said, it matters not if you are here or there, for I see you before me every moment. I see you in the light of the water, in the swaying of the young trees in the spring wind. I see you in the shadows of the great oaks, I hear your voice in the cry of the owl at night. You are the blood in my veins, and the beating of my heart. You are my first waking thought, and my last sigh before sleeping. You are - you are bone of my bone, and breath of my breath.”
― Juliet Marillier, Daughter of the Forest

“If a man has to say trust me it's a sure sign you cannot. Trust him, that is. Trust is a thing you do without words.”
― Juliet Marillier, Wildwood Dancing

“I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart.”
― Christopher Fowler, The Victoria Vanishes

“Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

“I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.”
― Vera Nazarian

“Everyone has the best of feelings towards mankind in general, but not towards the individual man. We'll kill men, but we want to save mankind. And that isn't right, your Reverence. The world will be an evil place as long as people don't believe in other people.”
― Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large

“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”
― Harry Crews

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.”
― Victoria Holt

“Clutter, either mental or physical, is the sign of a healthy curiosity.”
― Christopher Fowler, The Memory of Blood

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
― Oscar Wilde, Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man

“When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?”
― Quentin Crisp, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp

“We need to reclaim the word 'feminism'. We need the word 'feminism' back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42% of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective... There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots: then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.”
― Karel Čapek, Cross Roads

“In death, hope is everlasting.”
― Ildefonso Falcones, La mano de Fátima

“Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”
― Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

“In worshipping their nationhood men worship themselves and scorn others, and that is no healthy thing.”
― C.J. Sansom, Dissolution

“If you want to know what's in motherhood for you, as a woman, then - in truth - it's nothing you couldn't get from, say, reading the 100 greatest books in human history; learning a foreign language well enough to argue in it; climbing hills; loving recklessly; sitting quietly, alone, in the dawn; drinking whisky with revolutionaries; learning to do close-hand magic; swimming in a river in winter; growing foxgloves, peas and roses; calling your mum; singing while you walk; being polite; and always, always helping strangers. No one has ever claimed for a moment that childless men have missed out on a vital aspect of their existence, and were the poorer, and crippled by it.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Was there anything quite so under-rated in this shallow, plastic, global-corporate, tall-skinny-late, kiddy-meal-and-free-toy, united-colours-of-fuck-you-too world, than a good old-fashioned, no-frills, retail blow-job?”
― Christopher Brookmyre, The Sacred Art of Stealing

“I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.”
― stendhal