The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal.
— By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Quotes About Life
His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.
— The Glass Bead Game
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.
— The Emperor's Handbook
It is necessary ... to yield to the storm, purchase a peace, and wait patiently for better times.
— Twenty Years After
Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.
— Love and Responsibility
Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.
— Love in the Time of Cholera
I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.
If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you'll be right.
— I, Steve
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
— Mrs. Dalloway
Blessed with so many resources within myself the world was not necessary to me. I could do very well without it.
— Emma
You are, madame, so perfectly armoured, so completely sure of yourself.''Now I wonder, if I am to take that as a compliment?''It is, perhaps, a warning--not to treat life with arrogance.
— Murder in the Mews
Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
— Siddhartha
Limitation of one's freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.
— Love and Responsibility
Utterly sure of himself, convinced of his power, certain that the laws that governed other men couldn't touch him, he made straight for any goal he set himself, however rarified and dazzling, even if it were folly for anyone else to even consider it.
— The Three Musketeers
Distance sometimes lets you know who is worth keeping, and who is worth letting go.
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
— Orlando
Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.
— Love and Responsibility
I mean that success has come early. And that is dangerous. Always dangerous.
— The Mysterious Mr. Quin
— To the Lighthouse
I plead with you--never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.
— Pope John Paul II: In My Own Words
For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there mustbe between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and shehim.
— Mrs. Dalloway