Maanya Narendran > Maanya's Quotes

“I'd like to think of myself as delightfully complex.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“Fear is a phoenix... You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“Is this the part where we die well?"...
"No, this is the part where the king of Ravka surrenders himself, and the love we never had lives on in ballads and song."
"Nikolai," snapped Zoya, "don't you dare.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“You are a sceptic." "Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith." "What are you?" "To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty hat one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself”
― Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray (Collector's Edition): Including the Uncensored 13 Chapter Version & The Revised 20 Chapter Version

“I give the truths of tomorrow."
"I prefer the mistakes of today," she answered.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is only intellectually lost who ever argue.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
― Emily Jane Brontë , Wuthering Heights

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“What is life without laughter?”
― Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

“For every exit, there is also an entrance.”
― Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“That's the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don't expect them or want them.”
― Cecelia Ahern, If You Could See Me Now

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“I do not know how to make a distinction between tears and music”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“If you're reading this...
Congratulations, you're alive.
If that's not something to smile about,
then I don't know what is.”
― Chad Sugg, Monsters Under Your Head

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“It is what I have always loved about music. Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words -- the emotions, the stories, the truth -- that you can let flow right out of your mouth.

Music can dig, you know? It can take a shovel to your chest and just start digging until you hit something.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Art doesn't owe anything to anyone.
Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, no whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about it”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights