LibrarianCarina’s most recent Quotables

I write for not other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

How pleasant it is, at the end of the day,
No follies to have to repent;
But reflect on the past, and be able to say,
That my time has been properly spent.

You don't want to kill the messenger, you just want to kill the message.

In my experience, if you can not say what you mean, you can never mean what you say. The details are everything.

One's mind is never simply one's own, even at birth and even less so as one lives, learns, loses, etc.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

Each thing called improvement seems blackened with crimes,
If it tears up one record of blissful old times.

In a dream you are never eighty.

You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve theme? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.

Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission.

The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.

Some must be sacrificed for all to be saved. First I took that as a revelation for the future. Now I see that it is as much about how we got here as about where we are going. I think that one sentence is the greatest burden I have ever known.

There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

Suddenly you find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you,...as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.

Your face just broke the language barrier.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.