Rachel > Rachel's Quotes

“...there lay they sheltered from the wind
under mighty beeches silken-skinned,
and sang of love that still shall be,
though earth be foundered under sea,
and sundered here for evermore
shall meet upon the Western Shore.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Beren and Lúthien

“And both are gone. And ironically, I'm drawn to repeat my well known apothegm of futility: that, just as the person who wants praise will never be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And I therefore still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die. Fortunately, I've been able to get by very neatly without doing either.”
― Joseph Heller, God Knows

“Without a struggle, there can be no progress.”
― Frederick Douglass

“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“And how have I lived? Frankly and openly, though crudely. I have not been afraid of life. I have not shrunk from it. I have taken it for what it was at its own valuation. And I have not been ashamed of it. Just as it was, it was mine.”
― Jack London

“someone will remember us
I say
even in another time”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“I pray silently: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I don't know what it means, but it sounds right, and it will have to do, because I don't know what else I can say to God.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“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

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Aim higher in case you fall short.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“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 suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife