- I learned that men were born with power and women obtained it through sharpness of intellect and good hearts. -- Zainab Salbi, Between Two Worlds
- Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly. -- Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed. --Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Who is guilty of a greater injustice than he who inventeth a lie concerning God? -- Mohammad, The Koran, Sura XI
- And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,--the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,--exceedingly real. --Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
- In my contact with people I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls--with the great outside world...I have found that the happiest people are those who do the most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. --Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
- "I let go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home." --Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange
- The wings. . . are darker than the darkness, threatening but also redolent of standing solidly, on my own two feet, of running, running like flying. -- Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
- War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
- "Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see. . . They are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountain-top." -- Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
- "It happens, baby. . . You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you ever learned--the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and the Pythagorean theorem. . . You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. . . And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations--even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else." -- Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
- "Woe is the one who, languishing, waits for a lover." -- The Wife's Lament
- "It is a policy which entails suffering, and each one of you already knows what this suffering is; but its ultimate benefits are still far away and not yet clear for all to see...When things happen suddenly, unexpectedly, and against all calculation, it takes the heart out of a man...You must therefore be willing to face the greatest disasters and be determined never to sacrifice the glory that is yours." -- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
- "Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused." -- Unknown
- I had no delight but in tears, for tears had taken the place my friend had held in the love of my heart. -- Augustine's Confessions
- "He who will pass life away in bounding from one pleasure to another, must not complain if he acquire neither wisdom nor respectability of character." -- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- "When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings." -- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
- "...when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight." -- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
- "The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: 'What are you going through?' It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled 'unfortunate,' but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction." -- Simone Weil, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies
- "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
- "These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence...Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
- "Literature is for comforting the discomforted and discomforting the comfortable." -- David Foster Wallace
- "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked...and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." -- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- "What is to give light must endure burning." -- Viktor E. Frankl
jan 7 2009 ∞
jun 10 2014 +
jun 10 2014 +