Jenny > Jenny's Quotes

“To say we know a person is to write that person off.”
― Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

“You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“All the emails I get these days start with sorry but I've been so busy, and I don't understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“There are so many people in the world, and I want to know them all but I don’t even know my next-door neighbor’s name.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“I didn't know what to do, there was a feeling of time running out and a loss of momentum, of opportunities wasted.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“I'm surprised, but I'm glad, I realise that this is what i wanted that night last week, to simply make a connection and keep hold of it.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“He wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“Say excuse me but, really, I am actually very much in love with you.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“And I say too much of what, he says too much of everything, too much stuff, too many places, too much information, too many people, too much of things for there to be too much of, there is too much to know and I don't know where to begin but I want to try.”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.”
― Shawn Slovo, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.”
― Tom Stoppard , Arcadia

“It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“People decide what you're like before they even get to know you”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
― Albert Einstein

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
― William Butler Yeats

“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”
― Michel Legrand