Barbara Murphy > Barbara's Quotes

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
― Maya Angelou

“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“Come to me, squeeze my hand, know my loneliness, and give me the love, the strength to prevail on the perilous road before me.”
― Dang Thuy Tram

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.”
― Larry McMurtry

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“”
― Neil Gaiman

“A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Just that dwelling and planning is bullshit, you dwell on the past, you can’t move forward. Spend too much time planning for the future and you just push yourself backwards, or you stay stagnant in the same place all your life. Live in the moment, where everything is just right, take your time and limit your bad memories and you’ll get wherever it is you’re going a lot faster and with less bumps in the road along the way.”
― J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Never

“The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other. And maybe each time, we've been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“But love is this really powerful thing that everyone's got if they'd just learn how to accept it. I mean, come on. If it's something we all have to give, and if it's something we all want, doesn't that mean there's exactly enough to go around?”
― Philip Beard, Dear Zoe

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Common sense is not so common.”
― Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.”
― John Cowper Powys

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“I need to touch and hold the book, stroke the cover, and hear the voices inside so I will always be able to feel the magic.”
― Wanda

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.”
― Quentin Crisp

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
― Mother Teresa

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft