Chiffchaff Birdy > Chiffchaff's Quotes

“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”
― Iris Murdoch

“For a young woman today, developing femininity successfully requires meeting three basic demands. The first of these is that she must defer to others, the second that she must anticipate and meet the needs of others, and the third, that she must seek self-definition through connection with another. The consequences of these requirements frequently mean that in denying themselves, women are unable to develop an authentic sense of their needs or a feeling of entitlement for their desires. Preoccupied with others' experience and unfamiliar with their own needs, women come to depend on the approval of those to whom they give. The imperative of affiliation, the culture demand that a woman must define herself through association with another, means that many aspects of self are under-developed, producing insecurity and a shaky sense of self. Under the competent carer who gives to the world lives a hungry, deprived and needy little girl who is unsure and ashamed of her desires and wants.”
― Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike: Starving Amidst Plenty

“Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.”
― Alan Bennett

“She was in love, as she quite saw, with a middle - aged man who said the same thing to all the girls, who had been a prince for an evening which he'd most likely forgotten already, who had given her a ring with a redcurrant in it and who cared, to the exclusion of all else, for his work.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices

“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.”
― Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
― Albert Einstein

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
― Anthony G. Oettinger

“Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.”
― Iris Murdoch

“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“But surely liking the same things for dinner is one of the deepest and most lasting things you could possibly have in common with anyone,' argued Dr. Parnell. 'After all, the emotions of the heart are very transitory, or so I believe; I should think it makes one much happier to be well-fed than well-loved.”
― Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green

“There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.”
― Iris Murdoch

“The e-reader certainly sorts out the sheep from the goats, and divides those who need to read from those who like to turn the pages.”
― Margaret Drabble

“Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices

“Annie - although she also knew that those who don't speak have to pay it off in thinking - was resolved on silence. Whatever happened, and after all she was obliged to see Mr brooks two or three times every day, though she by no means looked forward to it, feeling herself more truly alive when she could picture him steadily without seeing him - whatever happened, he needn't know how daft she was.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices

“I don't want to put the world to rights... I just don't like people who put the world to wrongs.”
― Lee Child, 61 Hours

“before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes”
― Charlotte Mew

“Any idiot can face a crisis—it’s day to day living that wears you out.”
― Clifford Odets

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Tired of myself longing for what I have not”
― Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady

“People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.”
― Samuel Richardson

“Love gratified is love satisfied,
and love satisfied is indifference begun”
― Samuel Richardson

“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”
― Alain de Botton