birs > birs's Quotes

“HELMER: But this is disgraceful. Is this the way you neglect your most sacred duties?

NORA: What do you consider is my most sacred duty?

HELMER: Do I have to tell you that? Isn't it your duty to your husband and children?

NORA: I have another duty, just as sacred.

HELMER: You can't have. What duty do you mean?

NORA: My duty to myself.”
― Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.”
― Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Of all creatures that can feel and think,
we women are the worst treated things alive”
― Euripides, Medea

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“sanırım her yaradılışta belli bir kötülüğe doğru eğilim vardır... doğal bir kusur, en iyi eğitim bile üstesinden gelemez."

"sizin kusurunuz herkesten nefret etme eğilimi."

"sizinki de," dedi Darcy gülümseyerek, "isteyerek herkesi yanlış anlama.”
― Jane Austen, Aşk ve Gurur

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“My love for you
was greater than my wisdom.”
― Euripides, Medea

“I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once.”
― Euripides, Medea

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I believe that before anything else I'm a human being -- just as much as you are... or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.”
― Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“HELMER:—To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! You don’t consider what the world will say.
NORA:—I can pay no heed to that. I only know what I must do.
HELMER:—It is exasperating! Can you forsake your holiest duties in this world?
NORA:—What do you call my holiest duties?
HELMER:—Do you ask me that? Your duties to your husband and your children.
NORA:—I have other duties equally sacred.
HELMER:—Impossible! What duties do you mean?
NORA:—My duties towards myself.
HELMER:—Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
NORA:—That I no longer believe. I think that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are—or at least I will try to become one.”
― Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“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

“Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,
Lest that your heart's blood should run cold.”
― Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales

“And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal”
― Oscar Wilde

“Once a man has found himself there is nothing in this world that he can lose. And once he has understood the humanity in himself, he will understand all human beings.”
― Stefan Zweig, Fantastic Night & Other Stories

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“I'm not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, 'For the same reason I laugh so often--because I'm paying attention.' I tell them that we can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved. We must decide.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”
― Oscar Wilde

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“People change,feelings change, but that doesn’t mean that the love once shared wasn’t true and real. It simply means that sometimes when people grow, they grow apart”
― Scott Neustadter

“Ah," she said, "to come is easy and takes hours; to go is different—and may take centuries.”
― Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”
― J.D. Salinger