Martha > Martha's Quotes

“The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“It's our nature. We destroy. It's the constant of our kind. No matter the color of blood, man will always fall.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“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

“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Once you've seen how broken someone is it's like seeing them naked—you can't look at them the same anymore.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“One man can no more see into the mind of another than he can see inside a stone...”
― Graeme Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness.”
― John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“What an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community?

It is the sum total of our choices.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues....”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts... if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“...how time first grounds us and then confounds us....give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility kind of a cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is—was—a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But, of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“That is — your friend?"
"Philtatos," Achilles replied, sharply. Most beloved.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles