Shankari Giri > Shankari's Quotes

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“An Oyster of the old school whom nobody can open.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine, I say not a word. If I were not dumb, you would be deaf. Let that go by. It is not for your ears.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“That's the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people's.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that's not what boats were built for.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“You can't live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We're not in control.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Death does that to us, it's like a phone call, you always remember exactly what you should have said the moment you hang up.”
― Frederick Backman

“My memories are running away from me, my love, like when you try to separate oil and water. I'm constantly reading a book with a missing page and it's always the most important one.”
― Frederick Backman

“Taken as a whole, life gives us more opportunities for grief than celebration, more funeral drinks than wedding toasts.”
― Frederick Backman

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

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The solid, contour less body, like a block of granite and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn’t him.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“When your main game’s over, you can always move your chessboard elsewhere.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“To want is to have a weakness.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloudcover.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale