Martha > Martha's Quotes

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“People accepted the worst from each other, screaming and slapping. Divorce and abortion were never a plot option. If this was love or just inertia, Misty couldn't tell.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Peter used to say, "The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face." You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves su free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walking. Which China pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a Diary.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Todo nos hace falta cuando nos faltamos a nosotros mismos”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Desde qué ando todo el día entre la gente y veo lo que hacen y como se afanan, estoy mucho más contento de mi mismo”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What do you have in mind after you graduate?"

What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate
school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write
books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had
these plans on the tip of my tongue.

"I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III

“Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.”
― Isabel Allende, Paula

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.”
― James Hilton, Lost Horizon

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, 5-Book Boxed Set: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.”
― Anne Rice

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson

“Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the part you have to make up as you go.”
― Katharine Weber, The Music Lesson

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

“Love is a capricious creature which desires everything and can be contented with almost nothing.”
― Madeleine de Scudéry

“There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.”
― Sharon Olds

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood