Elisa > Elisa's Quotes

“Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“We all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate—as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class—is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’ ‘You know Thoreau?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“O, full of scorpions is my mind!”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“What, you egg?”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“So, imagine we’re all born with a set of feelings. Some are broader or deeper than others, but for everyone, there’s that ground floor, a bottom crust of the pie. That’s the maximum depth of feeling you’ve ever experienced. And then, the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it’s all right because that thing will happen to me when I’m older and wiser, and I’ll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won’t seem so terrible.

“But it happens to you when you’re young. It happens when your brain isn’t even fully done cooking—when you’ve barely experienced anything, really. The worst thing is one of the first big things that ever happens to you in your life. It happens to you, and it goes all the way down to the bottom of what you know how to feel, and it rips it open and carves out this chasm down below to make room. And because you were so young, and because it was one of the first big things to happen in your life, you’ll always carry it inside you. Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn’t just stop at the bottom —it goes all the way down.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I've been lucky enough now in my life to meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people - world leaders, inventors, musicians, astronauts, athletes, professors, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some (though not enough) of them are women. Some (though not enough) are black or of color. Some were born poor or have lives that to many of us would appear to have been unfairly heaped with adversity, and yet still they seem to operate as if they've had every advantage in the world. What I've learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collection of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn't go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Eventually - and I say this from experience - you'll start building a new house beside the ruins of the old. When you're ready, you'll know.”
― Trish Doller, Float Plan

“Carla once told me the best way to make a decision is to flip a coin. She said that when the coin is in the air, you'll usually figure our what you truly want.”
― Trish Doller, Float Plan

“Lightsong had never bothered to learn the rules.

He found it more amusing to play when he had no idea what he was doing.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker

“I don't have to believe in you to understand you," she said. "I'd say that those people who worship you are the ones who don't understand. They can't get close to you, see who you really are. They're too focused on the aura and the divinity.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker

“The subtlest and most significant thoughts of philosopher, psychologist, anthropologist, etc. do not become poetic by virtue of their mere inclusion in poetry: the poetic thinker is the poet.”
― H. Coombes, Literature and Criticism