Elizabeth Sharp > Elizabeth's Quotes

“But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“...because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

“Thinking within strict limits is stifling”
― Christian Bok, Eunoia

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.”
― Beatrix Potter

“I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess -”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“...what I dread more than anything else in this life is noise...silence helps you to go inward..anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Much more surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable, determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“But boys will be boys, our favorite phrase that excuses so many things, while the only thing we have for the opposite gender is women, said with disdain and punctuated with an eye roll.”
― Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

“You can love someone down to their core and they can love you right back just as hard, and if you traded diaries you’d learn things you never suspected. There’s a part of everyone deep down inside of them not meant for you. And the sooner you learn that, the easier your life is gonna be.”
― Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

“When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what.”
― Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

“There are parts of yourself that you hate; parts that you know other people wouldn't understand.”
― Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

“But home isn't where you land; home is where you launch. You can't pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“I’m not trying to get hurt, either. I’m not looking for pain,” I said. “You should be,” she said. “You should look all the time for it, so you know where it is, and you can stay far, far away.”
― Xhenet Aliu, Brass

“You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“I have never heard a more eloquent silence.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“This is where you can find your soul if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you've never dared look at before. Do not come here and ask me to show you how to draw a face. Ask me to help you find the wind.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“He has wondered lately if that's all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion