Ellen Kirkpatrick > Ellen's Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 41
« previous 1
sort by

  • #1
    Terry Pratchett
    “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

  • #2
    Anaïs Nin
    “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
    Anais Nin

  • #3
    Marcel Proust
    “My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”
    Marcel Proust

  • #4
    Roy T. Bennett
    “Push your boundaries beyond the ordinary; be that “extra” in “extraordinary.”
    Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

  • #5
    Roy T. Bennett
    “Change may not always bring growth, but there is no growth without change.”
    Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

  • #6
    Arundhati Roy
    “She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims...”
    Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

  • #7
    Mohsin Hamid
    “We are all migrants through time.”
    Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
    tags: time

  • #8
    Mohsin Hamid
    “when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
    Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

  • #9
    Naomi Alderman
    “Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.”
    Naomi Alderman, The Power

  • #10
    Rainbow Rowell
    “Just... isn't giving up allowed sometimes? Isn't it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?”
    “It sets a dangerous precedent.”
    “For avoiding pain?”
    “For avoiding life.”
    Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

  • #11
    Deanna Raybourn
    “She didn't look at me and I didn't look at her. Some questions are so direct the only way to ask them is sideways.”
    Deanna Raybourn, A Spear of Summer Grass

  • #12
    Kate Chopin
    “but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.”
    Kate Chopin, The Awakening

  • #13
    Kate Chopin
    “I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”
    Kate Chopin, The Awakening

  • #14
    Kate Chopin
    “Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”
    Kate Chopin, The Awakening
    tags: life

  • #15
    Melina Marchetta
    “If you weren't driving, I'd kiss you senseless," I tell him.
    He swerves to the side of the road and stops the car abruptly.
    "Not driving any more.”
    Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

  • #16
    Zadie Smith
    “Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”
    Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

  • #17
    Zadie Smith
    “I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.”
    Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

  • #18
    Zadie Smith
    “Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”
    Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

  • #19
    Zadie Smith
    “Between propriety and joy choose joy.”
    Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

  • #20
    Simone de Beauvoir
    “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
    Simone de Beauvoir

  • #21
    Ernest Hemingway
    “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
    Ernest Hemingway

  • #22
    Robin Hobb
    “When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.”
    Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

  • #23
    Robin Hobb
    “Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.”
    Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

  • #24
    Robin Hobb
    “Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.”
    Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

  • #25
    Robin Hobb
    “Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.”
    Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

  • #26
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    “It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.”
    Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

  • #27
    Elif Batuman
    “I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
    Elif Batuman, The Idiot

  • #28
    Elif Batuman
    “It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.”
    Elif Batuman, The Idiot

  • #29
    Elif Batuman
    “It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.”
    Elif Batuman, The Idiot

  • #30
    Elif Batuman
    “I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
    Elif Batuman, The Idiot
    tags: time



Rss
« previous 1