Here are 20 quotes from books that will broaden your expectations about life.
1. “I don’t know if there are any lessons to take from that except to realize that the things you think are mistakes may turn out not to be mistakes. I realized wherever you are, if you make the most of what you’ve got, you can find a way to keep moving forward.”
― Mike Massimino, Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
2. “Every person fails, nobody achieves everything that he or she set out to achieve. Nobody, regardless of how many personal triumphs they enjoy, no matter how rich or powerful they become, goes through life without encountering failure. You cannot fail unless a person valiantly tries to accomplish a task. The most audacious person readily attempts difficult projects, despite feeling uncertain if they can prevail. Successful people exhibit the character to respond positively to failure. Some failures prove instrumental in altering a person’s outlook, and their revised perspective leads to brilliant successes.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
3. “Stars are important,” I say, laughing.
“Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
4. “There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip
5. “The great thing about falling apart, is that you get to decide how to put yourself back together. Make good choices.”
― Stacie Hammond, Ana J. Awakens
6. “I’ve learned far too much to know everything.”
― J.S.B. Morse, Everyone Agrees: Book I: Words, Ideas, and a Universal Morality
7. “For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
8. “It’s so difficult, isn’t it? To see what’s going on when you’re in the absolute middle of something? It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.”
― S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep
9. “As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination…
The editor of Vogue might have had difficulty including photos of Chloe in an issue, but this was only a confirmation of the uniqueness that I managed to find in my girlfriend. I had animated her face with her soul.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love
10. “Today is a really bad day, Syd. A really, really bad day. Sometimes in life, we need a few bad days in order to keep the good ones in perspective.”
― Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday
11. “You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
12. “What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. … In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in
13. “Sanity is the one unbelievable bore. One must be mad, slightly twisted – then one sees life from a new and entrancing angle.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy
14. “We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
15. “We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way
16. “People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.”
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
17. “Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die. Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world. Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world. Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
18. “All people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.”
―Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
19. “It’s one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”
― Edward Albee, The American Dream & The Zoo Story
20. “Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.’ That depends… on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.”
― Jane Yolen, Briar Rose
Page By Paige 