Liz > Liz's Quotes

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.”
― B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity

“Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Mrs. Spencer said it was wicked of me to talk like that, but I didn’t mean to be wicked. It’s so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn’t it?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“She could keep her silence, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Oh, it makes SUCH a difference. It LOOKS so much nicer. When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can; and A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished. If you'll only call me Anne spelled with an E I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Marilla felt more embarrassed than ever. She had intended to teach Anne the childish classic, "Now I lay me down to sleep." But she had, as I have told you, the glimmerings of a sense of humor--which is simply another name for a sense of the fitness of things; and it suddenly occurred to her that simple little prayer, sacred to the white-robed childhood lisping at motherly knees, was entirely unsuited to this freckled witch of a girl who knew and cared nothing about God's love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“But really, Marilla, one can't stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“It's fun to be almost grown up in some ways, but it's not the kind of fun I expected, Marilla. There's so much to learn and do and think that there isn't time for big words.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”
― Judith Thurman

“Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.”
― Ma Jian, Red Dust: A Path Through China

“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”
― mary anne radmacher

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Invictus

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
― Haim G. Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers

“You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“If you own this story, you get to write the ending.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath