Sharon Lee > Sharon's Quotes

“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working -hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk. They lived at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was what it felt like.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Everything that burns, everything that rips me apart, I want to suffer with my body. I'd rather have a hundred wounds, whips, poisons - than this kind of suffering in the head, this phantom of suffering, which touches me softly and caresses me without ever really hurting.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“That's what I must avoid: I mustn't put strangeness where there's nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Men get the war they deserve.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Troubled Sleep

“Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.”
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”
― Graham Greene

“I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“We forget very easily what gives us pain.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
― Albert Camus