#we

It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#flattery #love #secret-love #sense #unavowed-love

What do we want to be prefects for?” said George, looking revolted at the very idea. “It’d take all the fun out of life. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#life

The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud --- the obstacles of life and its suffering. ... The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. ... Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. ↗

— Goldie Hawn

#depression #flower #growth #illness #kindness

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. ↗

— Kahlil Gibran

#power-of-music #life

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly. ↗

— Matthew Quick

#feelings-of-weakness #happiness #life #literature #movie

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#first time #i #life #looked #my life

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture. ↗

— George Eliot

#bigotry #harriet-beecher-stowe #jokes #stupidity #education

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days. ↗

— Eric Brown

#conscious #conscious thought #days #few #find

What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different. ↗

— V.C. Andrews

#life

MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#empowerment-of-women #mother-teresa #poverty #poverty-alleviation #life