Emma > Emma's Quotes

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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

“one never loves someone more than when one knows the least about them.”
― Christelle Dabos, A Winter's Promise

“I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“I'm not going to die," she said. "Not till I've seen it."
"Seen what?"
Her smile widened. "Everything.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“I apologize for anything I might have done. I was not myself.”
“I apologize for shooting you in the leg.” said Lila. “I was myself entirely.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“For the ones who dream of stranger worlds.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Silence creates its own violence.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to re-live, certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“It was like the last act on a set stage. It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn't know what except that he would not grieve. He would be humble and proud that he had been found worthy to be a part of it too or even just to see it too.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch