Tanya > Tanya's Quotes

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Don't gobblefunk around with words.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.”
― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

“It's difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. No one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.”
― Russell Brand

“Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.”
― Roald Dahl

“It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“This hill though high I covent ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way of life lies here.
Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear. ”
― John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I want to grow a flower for every time someone tells me “F*** you.” Then I’ll go back to that person and pin the flower on their lapel in a gesture of friendship. And while they are looking down on it in astonishment, I’ll bunch up my knuckles and punch them in the face.”
― Jarod Kintz, I Want Two apply for a job at our country's largest funeral home, and then wear a suit and noose to the job interview.

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson Mandela

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”
― Robert Frost

“It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
― Woody Allen

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I find out a lot about myself by sleeping. Dreams, they are who I am when I’m too tired to be me.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
― Rumi

“My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”
― Cecil Beaton

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against out habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”
― Alexander Supertramp Chris McCandless

“Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters