Sherry > Sherry's Quotes

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“He was forever dwelling on his failures. He held them up to the light and examined them in minute detail, like necklaces that had tangled in a drawer.”
― Elliott Holt

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
― Nikolai V. Gogol

“I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“What is a normal child like? Does he just eat and grow and smile sweetly? No, that is not what he is like. The normal child, if he has confidence in mother and father, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate . . . At the start he absolutely needs to live in a circle of love and strength (with consequent tolerance) if he is not to be too fearful of his own thoughts and of his imaginings to make progress in his emotional development.”
― Donald W. Winnicott

“The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water - either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in your rock - your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“I also work here because I love books, because I'm inveterately curious, and because, like most librarians, I'm not well suited to anything else. As a breed, we're the ultimate generalists. I'll never know everything about anything, but I'll know something about almost everything and that's how I like to live.”
― Josh Hanagarne, The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

“Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.”
― Paul Auster, Man in the Dark

“In the quiet of the morning
You only have to rise
To feel something's wrong.
Uncontrollable circumstances
Tense the air and you know
Something's going to happen.

--Susan Bernhardt”
― Susan Bernhardt, The Ginseng Conspiracy

“Perhaps the loaded question is: How often is maternal self-sacrifice really only masochistic martyrdom, destructive to the mother and destructive to the child as well?”
― Natalie Shainess, Sweet Suffering: Woman as Victim

“Tell me a story of deep delight.”
― Robert Penn Warren

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”
― Keri Hulme, The Bone People

“I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”
― Edith Sitwell

“If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers.”
― Ed Sullivan

“Celebrate who you are in your deepest heart. Love yourself and the world will love you.”
― Amy Leigh Mercree

“Your words will either give you joy or give you sorrow, but if they were spoken without regret, they give you peace.”
― Shannon Alder

“She was always daydreaming. She never wanted to live in the real world; she always seemed to be separated from other children her age. They couldn’t understand her or her imagination. She was always thinking outside of the box, breaking rules, and only following what her heart told her was right.”
― Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow

“In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents are buried
side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.

Then, all day, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.”
― Billy Collins

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”
― Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you'll always be alright.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“And people tended not to bother a woman with a book.”
― Cherie Priest, Dreadnought

“Alexia was rather strapping. He preferred her that way. Undersized women reminded him of yippy dogs.”
― Gail Carriger, The Parasol Protectorate Boxed Set: Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, Heartless and Timeless

“There is an art to irritation that only few of us can achieve.”
― Gail Carriger, The Parasol Protectorate Boxed Set: Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, Heartless and Timeless