Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992
Archive
Quotes
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
—Chinese proverbThe surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
—Germaine Greer, 1970By night an atheist half believes a God.
—Edward Young, c. 1745I’ve dreamed enough to have a drink.
—François Rabelais, 1546What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence, the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?
—Mary Renault, 1956Secrets define us, they mark us, they set us apart from all the others. The secrets which we preserve provide a key to who we are, deep down.
—Nuruddin Farah, 1998The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.
—Rachel Carson, 1962That obtained in youth may endure like characters engraved in stones.
—Ibn Gabirol, 1040New things are always ugly.
—Willa Cather, 1921But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent, red or black, high or smooth, narrow or bankless—and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves.
—Hélène Cixous, 1976It is not right for a ruler who has the nation in his charge, a man with so much on his mind, to sleep all night.
—Homer, c. 750 BC