Dorothy > Dorothy's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

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

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“You see, a conflict always begins with an issue - a difference of opinion, an argument. But by the time it turns into a war, the issue doesn't matter anymore, because now it's about one thing and one thing only: how much each side hates the other.”
― Neal Shusterman, Unwind

“Love is more than just a word. It is something you grow into with time.”
― Gemma Liviero, Broken Angels

“Each time my mother sank to the bottom of cold despair, she would always find a break in the ice above, to breathe new air, to find new purpose. She never indulged in self-pity, nor did she point the finger of blame for her misfortunes. Her heart was clear of bitterness. I believe that if a person’s strength of character is measured at the end of his or her life, it is by these qualities—qualities that allow a life to be lived, free of those restraints we place upon ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we should forget.”
― Gemma Liviero, Broken Angels

“She never indulged in self-pity, nor did she point the finger of blame for her misfortunes. Her heart was clear of bitterness. I believe that if a person’s strength of character is measured at the end of his or her life, it is by these qualities—qualities that allow a life to be lived, free of those restraints we place upon ourselves.”
― Gemma Liviero, Broken Angels

“I think that this place can strip a person of human traits. It can make one desire nothing and hope for even less.”
― Gemma Liviero, Broken Angels

“We will never go back there. We will never again be friends,’ he said to Mama, Leah, and me. And I understood. You cannot go back once you learn the truth about people’s feelings.”
― Gemma Liviero, Broken Angels

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered-- about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her...”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's story but, insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia