Rita Conde > Rita's Quotes

“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than any one can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“I’m just trying to wake up - I’m so afraid of sleeping all my life and then dying - I want to wake up first. I wouldn’t care if it was just for an hour, as long as I was properly alive and awake…”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Loving someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren't actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it's cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The moment was all; the moment was enough.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“... 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

“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon provides one of the simplest definitions of curiosity: the feeling of deprivation that comes from an information gap between what we know and what we want to know. Separately,”
― Philip Kotler, Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands, said Haldon.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Every flight begins with a fall.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“The human heart is like india-rubber; a little swells it, but a great deal will not burst it. If 'little than nothing' will disturb it, than 'little less than all things' will suffice to break it.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays