Corinne > Corinne's Quotes

“Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!”
― George Bernard Shaw

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“July 1936
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing - not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had
gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing
incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if
plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Everyday God gives us a moment in which it is possible to change everything that makes us unhappy.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Everyone when they are young knows what their destiny is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible.”
― Paulo Coehlo

“The world has a soul and whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of many things.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Eppur si muove.”
― Galileo Galilei

“We queers of Revelation hill...died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don't pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.”
― Paul Monette

“Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”
― Paul Monette

“Books Fall Open

Books fall open,
you fall in,
delighted where,
you've never been.
Hear voices
not once heard before,
Reach world through world,
through door on door.
Find unexpected
keys to things,
locked up beyond
imaginings….
True books will venture,
Dare you out,
Whisper secrets,
Maybe shout,
across the gloom,
to you in need
Who hanker for
a book to read.”
― David McCord

“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.”
― Lemony Snicket

“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“That's why I want to speak to you now.

To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)

I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”
― Adrienne Rich, Sources

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
― Adrienne Rich

“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.”
― Gregory Maguire