Hannah > Hannah's Quotes

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“Let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere than this.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“False was all this - false all but the affections of our nature, and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one good and one evil in the world - life and death. The pomp of rank, the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like morning mist. One living beggar had become of more worth than a national peerage of dead lords - alas the day! than of dead heroes, patriots, or men of genius. There was much of degradation in this: for even vice and virtue had lost their attributes - life - life - the continuation of our animal mechanism - was the Alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man

“It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really know she had: a soul.

What’s that? It is easy to define negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur."

If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.”
― Horace

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.”
― China Miéville

“I found this quote more relevant today than it was yesterday: 'Man is born to live in the convulsions of anxiety or the lethargy of boredom. Hard work is the final solution - it prevents all of the above.' - Voltaire”
― Shane Joseph, In the Shadow of the Conquistador

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates