Margot Haas > Margot's Quotes

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”
― Franz Kafka

“The soul can only blossom forth to its sublime and rare capacities when it feels it is being met with faith.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“...the parents are the first problem a child comes up against, the first resistance he has to assert himself against; his arguments with them are the model for all his later fights in life.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“Don't shut your eyes, don't give in to illusions, I will never change. My need to keep up an uninterrupted exchange of letters with you comes not from love but from my unhappy disposition”
― Franz Kafka

“...over and over, you would like to be recognized according to your own self, your own person, your own heart's inclination-but they always ask only what you have done, and really, if you look at it rationally, they have nothing else by which they can judge your state of mind except the manifestations of that state of mind.”
― Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“What you bought, you owned, and what you owned eventually came home to you.”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?”
― Stephen King, The Body

“The most important step a man can take. It's not the first one, is it?
It's the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“The question,’ she replied, ‘is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities...One doesn't get prizes for this increasing awareness, which sometimes comes with an intensity indistinguishable from pain.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“We cannot know for sure whether Plath's original order in "Ariel" was meant to suggest a narrative of recovery from anger, depression, and self-punishment. But her placement of "wintering" at the collection's end hints that she believed she was becoming more resilient, and that she may have began, before her own death, to forgive her father for dying.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“I need so to love a person-be it girl or boy, friend or enemy. And without being able to, I sort of dry up.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“His list of fears consisted of a single entry: “Everything,” he said.”
― Dave Itzkoff, Robin

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.”
― Dave Itzkoff, Robin

“He reminded me of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince: wistfully surveying a world to which he felt he didn’t quite belong.”
― Dave Itzkoff, Robin

“Because it is there”
― Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

“Devout Buddhists believe in sonam—an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

“Common sense is no match for the voice of God.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

“Hey Nash! You scared?'
'Terrified,mortified,petrified...stupefied by you!”
― Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

“maxims from Delphi were carved on to a monument, including: As a child, be well-behaved. As a youth, be self-controlled. As an adult, be just. As an elder, be wise. As one dying, be without pain.24”
― Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

“I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex