Lisa Lingrell > Lisa's Quotes

“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. ”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Wouldn't that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music... That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.”
― Chris Cleave, The Other Hand

“Death, of course, is a refuge. It's where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It's where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you've been carrying the weather around with you.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent."

Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."

I sighed and looked out at Little Bee

Well," I said, "maybe this is a developing world.”
― Chris Cleave

“This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth's surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“And thus love makes fools of us all.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“The future looks like gasoline. . . . crude oil . . . is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
― Daphne duMaurier, Rebecca

“We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.”
― Chris Cleave, Incendiary

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Perhaps," said the man, "you would like to be lost with us. I have found it much more agreeable to be lost in the company of others.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

“They were always on the move.But in truth said bull we are all going nowhere”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

“The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard - one that thinks too much.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

“You'd be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

“How can you get very far,
If you don't know who you are?
How can you do what you ought,
If you don't know what you've got?
And if you don't know which to do
Of all the things in front of you,
Then what you'll have when you are through
Is just a mess without a clue
Of all the best that can come true
If you know What and Which and Who.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh