Wong > Wong's Quotes

“Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it's our own expectations that crush us." -- from Skippy Dies”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“Ignoring is what you are supposed to do with bullies, so they get bored and leave you alone. But the problem in school is that they don't get bored, because whatever else there is to do is more boring still.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“Fix that hair! Close that mind! Repeat after me! Page me the second the old man croaks it! Now, are you boys ready? A Seabrook boy is always ready. Ready to work. Ready to play. Ready to listen to his teachers, especially the greatest educator of them all, Jesus. as Jesus said to me once, Greg, what's your secret? And I said, Jesus--study your notes! Get to class! Shave that beard! You show up to your first day on the job dressed like a hippie, of course they're going to crucify you, I don't care whose son you are . . .”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“Never frown even when ur sad, coz u never know whose falling in love with ur smile!”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“To hear people talk, you would think no one ever did anything but love each other. But when you look for it, when you search out this love everyone is always talking about, it is nowhere to be found; and when someone looks for love from you, you find you are not able to give it, you are not able to hold the trust and dreams they want you to hold, any more than you could cradle water in your arms.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word....”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
― Benjamin Spock

“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty that God’s got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning’s a sin, it’s pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I’m fine.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“That was the difference between a hero and a villain, a soldier and a murderer, a victory and a crime. Which side of a river you called home.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“Shivers heaved out a sigh. “Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I’m one of those … you’ve got a word for it, don’t you?”

“Idiots?”

He looked sideways at her. “It was a different one I had in mind.”

“Optimists.”

“That’s the one. I’m an optimist.”

“How’s it working out for you?”

“Not great, but I keep hoping.”

“That’s optimists. You bastards never learn.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“I dreamed I spoke in another's language,
I dreamed I lived in another's skin,
I dreamed I was my own beloved,
I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.

I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,
And when I breathed a garden came,
I dreamed I knew all of Creation,
I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.

I dreamed--and this dream was the finest--
That all I dreamed was real and true,
And we would live in joy forever,
You in me, and me in you.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“being a successful person is not necessarily defined by what you have achieved, but by what you have overcome.”
― Fannie Flagg, The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“Death belongs to life as birth does
The walk is in the raising of the
foot as in the laying of it down”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“God waits to win back his own flowers as gifts from man's hands. ”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple. With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.”
― Jenny Joseph, Warning: When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

“And someone turns out the lights in the library, as if being in the dark will make them invisible, but the noise reaches into the house, into the room, into their lungs. Someone is being beaten in the street below. What are they going to do? How long can you pretend this is not happening?”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

“There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can something gain you a space in which to live.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“He stands with his hands in his pockets, well-dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain