Sara > Sara's Quotes

“We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice Through The Looking Glass

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“for my greatest skill has been to want but little.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty.
I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.”
― George Carlin

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“I thought of all the ways that life might snap into, destroying the clarity and order of our world. Never in those days did I fathom that loss comes gradually, so slow you barely notice; never did it occur to me that things can simply dissolve.”
― Michele Richmond

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening... ”
― rainer maria rilke

“Photographs are so strange; they are always in the present tense, everyone captured in a moment that will never come again.”
― Natasha Solomons, The House at Tyneford

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“The fact that you don’t grasp the meaning of something doesn’t mean it has none.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, When I Found You

“Meaning…they say the best way to judge what a man will do is by looking at what he’s done in the past.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, When I Found You

“I allowed myself to consider the infinity of details that might have left Jennie alive. A change of weather the day she died, rain keeping the girls inside. One of us taking longer int he bathroom that morning and delaying Jennie's walk to the field. A broken washing machine and all the girls pitching in to help do the laundry by hand. Sometimes my tracing of consequence and connection went back as far as the war. If Frank had not survived, Jennie would have. The possibilities were endless.”
― Rhonda Riley, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

“A Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin said that "the self is the gift of the other" It seems to me most true now. The genes I carry, the clothes I wear, the food I eat all have come through the hands of others. Even those words I write now, my vocabulary, are not only mine. They are an agreement, a social contract between the two of us.”
― Rhonda Riley, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

“What do we know of our mothers? I thought I knew her. But I'd seen her as a child sees a good mother--pure, transparent, incapable of deception.”
― Rhonda Riley, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

“I take in a huge breath and look at the sky as hard as I can. I feel like I'm trying to eat it with my eyes. I wish there would be certain things you come across and you could say, Okay, that's one. Put that away for me to pull out later just exactly as it is now. My dream is for me to be a poet who could make things like this sky come to life for someone else. If you see a sunset and try and describe it to someone in normal words, all you can say is, "Boy, I saw a great sunset last night." but if you are a poet, you give it to someone to feel for themselves. Like you make a little seed of what you say, they swallow it, and it blooms again inside their own heart.”
― Elizabeth Berg

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society