Britta > Britta's Quotes

“You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“Thats what makes a view so sad, and so beautiful. It'll be there when we're not.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

“The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women

“Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the roles of their type.”
― H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay

“If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it singlehanded.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Villete

“That aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place.”
― NABOKOV, Mary, Mary

“Sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“The thing is, if you get very depressed about something, it's hard as hell to swallow.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It is dreadful that one cannot tear our the past by the roots. We cannot tear it out but we can hide the memory of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I'd read it already, but I wanted to read certain parts over again.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive because of any ethical reason it does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would kill it. It survived because it is a source of pleasure and because the passionate few can no more neglect it then a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read "the right things" because they are right. That is to put the cart before the horse "the right things" are the right things solely because the passionate few like reading them …

Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time. Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive Generations; whereas, with Classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative to decide your taste is unformed. It needs guidance and it needs authoritative guidance.

Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It, as quoted by S. I. Hayakawa”
― S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

“I'm afraid your principles on some points are eccentric.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste.”
― George Eliot

“We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“The desire of life and health is implanted in man's nature;- the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently bu what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“Rome took all the vanity out of me, for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair."
"Why should you, with so much energy and talent?"
"That's just why, because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a common-place dauber, so I don't intend to try anymore.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“I'll hold you in my heart, until I can hold you in my arms.”
― JM Barrie, Peter Pan: J M Barrie illustrated by Steve Hutton

“Don't let politeness interfere with truth”
― Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs / Dear Enemy

“What a fool I was not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul".”
― Willima Ernest Henley

“I believe books should be like a prime rib steak ~ good and thick.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.”
― Ettore Scola

“The village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star.”
― Charles Dickens

“That is a compliment which gives me no pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey