jane > jane's Quotes

“Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.”
― Robert Browning, The complete poetical works of Browning

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
― Christopher Morley, Pipefuls

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”
― John Cheever

“I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.”
― Amy Sedaris, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
― William Goldman, Four Screenplays with Essays

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
― James Joyce

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.”
― Francesco Petrarca

“The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
― Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“I now walk into the wild.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“The heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.”
― Noah Webster

“I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.”
― Henry James

“Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
― Charles Chaplin

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”
― George Gordon Byron

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You know how sometimes you lie in bed at night and think, “What if the law of gravity just wears out and lets go and I drift into space?” Does that ever make you anxious?”
― Elaine May

“For man is essentially alone, and one should pity him and love him and grieve with him.”
― Halldór Laxness

“I've always loved high style in low company.”
― Anita Loos

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets