Rita Tomás > Rita's Quotes

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“There are fights that you may lose without losing your honor; what makes you lose your honor is not to fight.
-Jaques Jaujard”
― Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

“If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we… must summon to our defense all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds.…”
― Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History

“The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won … it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.”
― Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Reading is probably another way of being in a place.”
― José Saramago, El hombre duplicado

“Is there anything more frightening than people?”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“The most expensive part of building is the mistakes.”
― Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

“i am a museum full of art
but you had your eyes shut”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and honey

“Um leitor vive mil vidas antes de morrer”
― George R.R. Martin, Os Reinos do Caos, Volume II de II

“Apenas se deviam ler os livros que nos picam e que nos mordem. Se o livro que lemos não nos desperta como um murro no crânio, para quê lê-lo?”
― F. Kafka

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“Libraries are lungs, [...] books the fresh air breathed in to keep the heart beating, to keep the brain imagining, to keep hope alive.”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“Books and ideas are like blood; they need to circulate, and they keep us alive.”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“Try not to hold that against them; you never know what’s in their heart. Don’t be afraid to be different. Stand your ground. During bad times, remember that nothing lasts forever. Accept people for who they are, not for who you want them to be. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Or, as my friend Odile would say, ‘in their skin.’ ”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“Sometimes I like books more than people.”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury