Maddy > Maddy's Quotes

“I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality ... How many forgotten heroes sleep in history's great cemetery?”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“I will clamber through the clouds and exist.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends

“There is a correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm! The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad! The universe is full of intentions, you know. Everything happens for a purpose.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“First the colours.
Then the humans.
That’s usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“But I do love the world,” I whispered to the empty room. I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf the singing bird which falls and is not seen again, the lost ones, the failures of the world.”
― Loren Eiseley

“I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty and I wonder how the same can be both.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I am haunted by humans.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like...

"One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"

And a little later you added: "You know, one loves the sunset, when one is so sad..." "Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"

But the little prince made no reply.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince & Letter to a Hostage

“I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Ice Palace and Other Stories

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“My heart is so tired”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“[...] don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? ... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“My soul is in the sky.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...”
― Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass

“It was a Monday and they walked on a tightrope to the sun.”
― Marcus Zusak, The Book Thief

“There were stars. They burned my eyes.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”
― Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
― Lemony Snicket

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald