Quotes

Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.

I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS. 

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts. 

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world. 

Memory is more indelible than ink. 

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear. 

Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. 

Patience is a conquering virtue. 

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars. 

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. 

We loved with a love that was more than love. 

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. 

When the enemy has no face, society will invent one. 

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind. 

The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it. 

The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read 

Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it. 

Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. 

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on. 

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. 

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. 

Wind is lord and change is sovereign of the strand. 

I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear. 

The greatest danger to our future is apathy. 

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

What happens when people open their hearts?" 
"They get better. 

I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone. 

If they strain me up tight, why, let 'em look out! I can't bear it, and I won't.

I've found that there is always some beauty left -- in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. 

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is. 

Without movement there is no Life...We should use our energy to the fullest. 

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. 

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations. 

When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be. 

In the summer 
I stretch out on the shore 
And think of you. Had I told the sea 
What I felt for you, 
It would have left its shores, 
Its shells, 
Its fish, 
And followed me. 

Spring is the time of plans and projects. 

Little islands are all large prisons; one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow. 

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. 

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. 

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep. 

This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down. 

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives. 

There is a wilderness we walk alone 
However well-companioned 

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry. 

There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing. 

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. 

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone. 

Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. 

We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. 

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. 

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together. 

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready. 

You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things. 

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go. 

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free. 

Day and night I always dream with open eyes. 

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. 

To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better. 

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. 

Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life. 

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. 

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you 
Till China and Africa meet, 
And the river jumps over the mountain 
And the salmon sing in the street 

That which you believe becomes your world. 

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree. 

Everyone forgets Icarus also flew. 

People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature. 

For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society. 

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it. 

The winds were warm about us, the whole earth seemed the wealthier for our love. 

You might as well answer the door, my child, 
the truth is furiously knocking. 

We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky. 

She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter. 

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me 
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean. 

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. 

She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what. 

Comedy is the blues for people who can’t sing. 

I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's 
why. 

Your thorns are the best part of you. 

What I am 
is tired of jam.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. 

Let our scars fall in love. 

I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it. 

Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. 

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. 

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm. 

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves 
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; 
All mimsy were the borogoves, 
And the mome raths outgrabe. 

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. 

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it. 

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. 

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

It's true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get in a person's blood even if he doesn't remember having them. 

I am a tiny seashell 
that has secretly drifted ashore 
and carries the sound of the ocean 
surging through its body. 

I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me. 

I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen. 

Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.

Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious. 

It is a wonderful seasoning of all enjoyments to think of those we love. 

Nobody said not to go. 

All the world's a stage we're going through. 

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing. 

Don't be afraid. There's the two of us now. 

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. 

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end. 

One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away. 

I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive. 

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself 

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. 

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate. 

You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.