Helen Hooven Santmyer · 1184 pages
Rating: (11.3K votes)
“In a way, looking back, it seemed a long, long time since she had been eighteen, but in another way her memories were so clear and vivid that it seemed like yesterday. Time was an accordion, all the air squeezed out of it as you grew old. And how strange that in your mind you did not feel any older. You were the same person, but where had the years gone?”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“But surely, if you trust God, you can believe the bad moments pass, and the good memories are worth enough.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“She was moved to a profound but pleasurable melancholy by the evidence that human life is brief and long survived by the material things it had believed itself to possess.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“But Calvinists have never been pacifists: they have always been all too ready for a fight.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“When we get presidents with brains it's purely by accident. Who was ever selected for his brains? We choose them for other qualities, or because they can be elected.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
Helen Hooven Santmyer
Born place: in Cincinnati, Ohio, The United States
Born date November 25, 1895
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“You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life
“I don't know whether the spider perhaps does not hate the fly he has marked and is snaring. Dear little fly! It seems to me that the victim is loved, or at least may be loved. Here I love my enemy. I am delighted, for instance, that she is so beautiful. I am delighted, madam, that you are so haughty and majestic. If you were meeker it would not be so delightful. You have spat on me -- and I am triumphant. If you were literally to spit in my face I should really not be angry because you -- are my victim; mine and not his. How fascinating was that idea! Yes, the secret consciousness of power is more insupportably delightful than open domination. If I were a millionaire I believe I should take pleasure in going about in the oldest clothes and being taken for a destitute man, almost a beggar, being jostled and despised. The consciousness of the truth would be enough for me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Adolescent
“It's like I'm caught between two versions of myself. The person I used to be and the person i'm too scared to become. I feel like I'm looking in a mirror and my reflection doesn't match. I just want to be myself again. Only I'm not sure who that is anymore. Is it the girl in the mirror, the one I've struggled to be my entire life? Or is it this stranger living inside me who wants nothing to do with her? How do you decide between them? How do you know which one is really you?”
― Jessica Brody, quote from My Life Undecided
“If life could be reduced to the purely rational, to a solvable equation, there would be no mystery, no excitement. Life would become utterly predictable; a tedious movie that could never surprise.”
― Douglas E. Richards, quote from Wired
“Man's desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceiv'd.”
― William Blake, quote from The Complete Illuminated Books
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