Colleen Browne > Colleen's Quotes

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.”
― Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays

“There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.”
― Henry Adams

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“Never give up... No one knows what's going to happen next.”
― L. Frank Baum

“There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.”
― Molly Ivins

“So keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds,
but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Be outrageous... rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through celebrating the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was!”
― Molly Ivins

“Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.”
― Joanne Woodward

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
― oscar wilde

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”
― Immanuel Kant

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“Associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for ‘tis better to be alone than in bad company.”
― George Washington

“Nations and individuals accept national and individual responsibility to take action to solve the problem, or else deny responsibility by self-pity, blaming others, and assuming the role of victim.”
― Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

“Rigidity or inflexibility can be the result of a previous history of abuse or trauma, or of an upbringing that offered a child no permission to experiment or to deviate from the family norms. Flexibility can come from the freedom of having been allowed to make one’s own choices as one was growing up.”
― Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

“If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish.”
― Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly: The Secrets of Perfect Decision-Making

“he makes my heart flutter like a clean sheet on a long line.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”
― W. B. Yeats

“He lifted himself from a wheelchair to lift the nation from its knees.”
― Jean Edward Smith, FDR

“In the U.S. there are over two million people locked up, and it takes one million employees and $80 billion in tax dollars to take care of them.”
― John Grisham, The Guardians

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”
― Jean Genet

“Vague, foolish sorrow stops at the door of my soul, stares at me awhile, and moves on, he murmured, smiling to himself. A man must read widely, a little of everything or whatever he can, but given the shortness of life and the verbosity of the world, not too much should be demanded of him.”
― José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories