Quotes from books I’ve read so far this year

“One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.”

~ Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning.”

~ Zora Neale Hurston, Written by Herself

“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”

~ Zora Neale Hurston, Written by Herself

“I began to reflect upon life rather seriously for a girl of twelve or thirteen. What was I here for? What could I make of myself? Must I submit to be carried along with the current, and do just what everybody else did? No: I knew I should not do that, for there was a certain Myself who was always starting up with her own original plan or aspiration before me, and who was quite indifferent as to what people generally thought.”

~ Lucy Larcom, Written by Herself

“It was the ancient superstition that unhappiness resides in the country without, not within, and that one may cure a broken heart by a simple change of address.

~ Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Written by Herself

“To fall in love is very easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.”

~ Anna Louise Strong, Written by Herself

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom had pronounced necessary for their sex.”

~ Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre