Ettie > Ettie's Quotes

“You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.”
― Henry Nouwen

“I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.”
― Arundhati Roy

“The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America. ”
― Arundhati Roy

“Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”
― Arundhati Roy

“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”
― Arundhati Roy

“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.”
― Arundhati Roy

“People always loved best what they identified most with.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”
― Walt Whitman

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”
― George Orwell

“Love has no age, no limit; and no death.”
― John Galsworthy

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
― Lao Tzu

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Living well is the best revenge.”
― George Herbert

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It's what the sunflowers do.”
― Helen Keller

“Christians don't tell lies they just go to church and sing them.”
― A.W. Tozer

“When you learn, teach, when you get, give.”
― Maya Angelou

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”
― Anonymous

“The world is like that -- incomprehensible and full of surprises .”
― Jorge Amado, Gabriela, clavo y canela

“One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name