Hannah M > Hannah's Quotes

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
― Robert Frost

“You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I've read that if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“But then it passed, as all things do.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me than men had walked on the moon. “No,” he said, putting down his fork.
“It’s true,” chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up along the way.
“I don’t believe it.”
“I saw it,” said Bunny. “It was on television.”
“How did they get there? When did this happen?"”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.”
“Well, of course, I do too,” said Henry matter-of-factly. “But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it.”
Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. “No,” he said. “Not that bad.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,” he said. “You are like children. Afraid of the dark.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Matters progressed.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room -- curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in the kitchen, everyone tugging at collars and dull-eyed with fatigue -- but the instant the doorbell rang their spines would straighten, conversation would snap to life, the very wrinkles would fall from their clothes.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“This is what Achilles will feel like when he is old. And then I remembered: he will never be old.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“She's singing to-night to bring the chandelier down!”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”
― Franz Kafka

“Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.”
― Franz Kafka