Laura > Laura's Quotes

“He made so many people uneasy. Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and no one ever said anything.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering – indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 × 1022) molecules of oxygen – so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived.1 And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“We all do what we do.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“So that was it: now that she thinks he’s “one of us” she can lecture him. She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“What do you want from us? The dumb girls are too dumb, the smart girls are too smart, and the average girls are too unexceptional?”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Man's discovery that his genetilia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe”
― Susan Brownmiller

“Stop breaking yourself down into bite-sized pieces. Stay whole and let them choke.” –”
― Florence Given, Women Don't Owe You Pretty

“Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”
― Victor Frankl

“Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”
― Confucius

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
― Joseph Campbell

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

(Little Gidding)”
― T.S. Eliot

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“November, December, January - elongated stretches of nothing. What did I do, what did I think, who was the Min there, inhabiting this body?”
― Min Kym, Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung