Reflective Quotes

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
― Jim Rohn

“But death was her curse and her gift, and death had been her good friend these long, long years.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Crown of Midnight

“He felt as though he were failing in practically every area of his life. Lately, happiness seemed as distant and unattainable to him as space travel. He hadn't always felt this way. There had been a long period of time during which he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people's lives. Mistakes are made, regrets form, and all that was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious. ”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Choice

“The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.”
― John Ruskin

“I have had the best day ever more times that I can remember. So yes,
I believe I am ready to die if that is what is needed to live as I want to.”
― Hendri Coetzee, Living the Best Day Ever

“Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' gold
And like the sky my soul is also turnin'
Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind”
― Ray Lamontagne, God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise

“Everyone knows that Africa is not reasonable place but if we can get
across that neither are we, we strengthen the bond with the continent.
People are not conscious beings, just ask any marketer. Irrationality
of the early explorers, irrationality of the new ones, irrationality
of the place we go into. What a great canvas we have to paint on...”
― Hendri Coetzee, Living the Best Day Ever

“There was no private ownership of land. "You could own a knife, or you could own a horse, but you couldn't own ground any more than you could own the sun or the wind. The Earth was their mother and part of the Cosmos given to all creatures by the Great Spirit.”
― John-Paul Cernak, The Odyssey of a Hippie Marijuana Grower

“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

“I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence. ”
― David James Duncan

“Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“The “facts” about Ali’s life are few, and come from Wallace’s writing. Wallace was a careful writer, but he naturally wrote through his own perceptions, memories, and filters.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”
― Douglas Coupland

“These are desparate times." - Stephanie Plum”
― Janet Evanovich, One for the Money

“I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“Hoy en día la gente conoce el precio de todo y el valor de nada.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Qui se humilliat exaltabitur”
― Cervantes, Don Quixote

“We chart delusions through collective agreement.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“My wandering imagination never gives up on me and always finds ways to explore what my emotions entail.”
― Chimnese Davids, Muses of Wandering Passions

“From ancient to modern times, the human animal knows how to find fighting.”
― Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle

“Nadie se forma en la cola de las tortillas para comprar pan”
― Regina Kuri

“Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.”
― Freya North, Chances

“Teardrop Swarm by Stewart Stafford

Entombed by verdant prison bars,
On land where I once held sway,
Drowned in Death's tearful surf,
In which we all get swept away.

Weep at a rock bearing my name,
A vacant space once familiar there,
Lost and lingered in limbo longing,
Planted in pastures, green and fair.

Arch headstones are defiant cliffs,
For Reaper's wrath to crash upon,
A foundling rage's pristine triumph,
In foam white light, multitudes gone.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“...but she liked it. She had an unconscious fascination for tilting her head down towards melancholy.”
― Leonardo Berch, Fragments of Self: a novel of love across borders

“Even if the story relating to some of them may not belong to literary history, it certainly does belong in the story of my life.”
― Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story