Claire > Claire's Quotes

“I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Not all monsters were three-ton reptiles with poisonous breath. Many wore human faces.”
― Rick Riordan, The Hidden Oracle

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde

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

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child”
― Maria Montessori

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“And I think about all the things we could be
if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
― Edith Sitwell

“After all," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

“Let me tell you: the only way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.”
― Evgeny Shvarts, Дракон. Клад. Тень. Два клена. Обыкновенное чудо и другие произведения

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis