Kiki > Kiki's Quotes

“Reader, I married him.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?”
― E.M. Forster

“Only connect!”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”
― E.M. Forster

“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity—how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.”
― E. M. Forster

“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”
― E. M. Forster, Howards End

“But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Human beings have their great chance in the novel.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secreat understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.”
― E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy

“Real freedom is freedom from the opinions of others. Above all, freedom from your opinions about yourself. ”
― Brennan Manning, The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives – A Stirring Invitation to Accept God's Unfathomable Love

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore.”
― Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

“I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.”
― E. M. Forster

“If she was liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breathe her; if she was a pill, she would down her'; if she was a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. —E. O. Wilson”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The crucial challenge is to learn how to read critically, analyze data, and formulate ideas—and most of all to enjoy the intellectual adventure enough to be able to do them easily and often.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“the central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Being forced to write clearly means, first, you have to think clearly.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.”
― Florence Nightingale

“Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.”
― Florence Nightingale

“Women never have a half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have 'no time in the day to themselves.' 1852”
― Florence Nightingale

“Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself, but) how can I provide for this right thing to be always done?”
― Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not

“Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them.”
― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“The kind of people I absolutely cannot tolerate are those who never let you forget they are religious. It seems to me that a truly religious person would let his life be example enough, would not let his religion interfere with being a human being, and would not be so insecure as to have to fawn publicly before his gods.”
― W.P. Kinsella

“The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport. ”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty