Gabi > Gabi's Quotes

“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.”
― E.B. White

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. ”
― Hermann Hesse

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

“There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.”
― Linda Grayson

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

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”
― John Lennon

“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
― Milan Kundera

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Grandfather informs me that is not possible.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“With writing, we have second chances.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War, and also Peace, which are both premium books.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.”
― Anonymous