Kim > Kim's Quotes

“Memories are like the heart; you mustn’t ask too much of them. Just let them get on quietly with their schooling.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“We all fashion ourselves to the false world in which we live and in so doing become false ourselves. I saw this all the time during the occupation. How people could convince themselves that locking up and deporting Jews, including children, was a rational consequence of events. How the same people who shrugged off news of executions and deportations were beside themselves with rage when someone tried to jump a queue.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“Do you know what the most secret stubbornly-defended part of our identity is? It’s the private concessions we make to our cowardice.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“He made me forget myself, sometimes the most precious gift one person can give another.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Kindness is probably the most underrated human quality. We tend to dismiss it when we come across it and seek out more exciting character traits. But kindness is often a refined form of courage. It brings light and warmth into the world. You should always value kindness when you find it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“The key to understanding every story is to find yourself in it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“To love makes one solitary.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?”
― Patti Smith, M Train: A Memoir

“In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.”
― Patti Smith, M Train: A Memoir

“Not all dreams need to be realized.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”
― Patti Smith