Christine > Christine's Quotes

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“And I have no control over which yesterdays I keep and which ones get deleted. This disease will not be bargained with. I can't offer it the names of the US presidents in exchange for the names of my children. I can't give it the names of state capitals and keep the memories of my husband.
...My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I'll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I'll forget it some tomorrow doesn't mean that I didn't live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn't mean that today doesn't matter.”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
― Hal Borland

“I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun. ”
― George Plimpton

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?”
― Edward Albee

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Love is a rebellious bird,
that nobody can tame,
and you call him quite in vain,
if it suits him not to come.”
― Ludovic Halévy

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.”
― Billy Collins

“The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”
― Billy Collins

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“The medium is the message.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”
― Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Art is anything you can get away with.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man