Caley Brennan > Caley's Quotes

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“Books were a safe place, a world apart from my own. No matter what had happened that day, that year, there was always a story in which someone overcame their darkest hour. I wasn't alone.”
― Kiera Cass, The Siren

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Do you know a cure for me?"

"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."

"Salt water?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“But women aren’t broken versions of men; they’re women.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“A beige cat came down the stairs like caramel seeping out of a Caramilk bar.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“A cat's tail waved above the arm of the couch like an elegant hand in a black glove waving goodbye.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“The cat looked at its paws and frantically back at its body, as if it had just been transformed into a cat and couldn't accept it.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?”
― Amanda McKittrick Ros, Delina Delaney

“She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.”
― David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“Love was lazy as hell. Love laid around in bed, warm from the sheets and the sunlight pouring into the room. Love was too lazy to get up to close the blinds. Love was too comfortable to get up and go pee. Love took too many naps, it watched TV, but not really, because it was too busy kissing and napping. Love was also funny, which somehow made the bed more comfortable, the laughter warming the sheets, softening the mattress and the lovers’ skin.”
― Adi Alsaid, Never Always Sometimes

“There are houses in Gloucester where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Back in Gloucester, Chris Cotter has a similar dream. Bobby appears before her, all smiles, and she says to him, “Hey, Bobby, where you been?” He doesn’t tell her, he just keeps smiling and says, “Remember, Christina, I’ll always love you,” and then he fades away. “He’s always happy when he goes and so I know he’s okay,” says Chris. “He’s absolutely okay.”
― Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Remember the acorn. Even when you don't see it growing, it's pushing past the dirt. Reaching for the sun. Growing stronger.”
― Sharon G. Flake, The Skin I'm In

“The best years of our lives are not behind us. They're part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn't live in New York.”
― Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“what a luxury it was for people to hold their loved ones whenever they wanted”
― Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Don’t you miss it, any of it?'
…

'I couldn’t say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don’t know.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain broke clear and could, she found she could choose her dreams.

She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and scents. It would be come her life once again and she was held and safe. Everything undecided. Everything still new.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See