A Reader. > A Reader.'s Quotes

“No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn't stop for your grief.”
― Faraaz Kazi

“I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“I wish creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!", "You'll get used to it in time," said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -
And the songs of every poet past and forever.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“A friend said to me, “Hey you need to grow a pair. Grow a pair, Bro.” It’s when someone calls you weak, but they associate it with a lack of testicles. Which is weird, because testicles are the most sensitive things in the world. If you suddenly just grew a pair, you’d be a lot more vulnerable. If you want to be tough, you should lose a pair. If you want to be real tough, you should grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
― Sheng Wang

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
― Rumi

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“...I committed a sin the day I refused you - I discovered metal inside me where my heart should be - forgive me, Love, for acting on principles...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you
Little by little
If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me
For I shall already have forgotten you

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember
That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off to seek another land”
― Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Did you really want to die?"
"No one commits suicide because they want to die."
"Then why do they do it?"
"Because they want to stop the pain.”
― Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca