Quotes about high
page 6

“Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.”

Arnold Lobel (1933–1987) American children's illustrator and writer

Love, Books, Time, Reading

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Winter, 1931-1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Life, Search

“I shall think of you
Whenever I am most happy, whenever I am Most sad, whenever I see a beautiful thing.
You are a burning lamp to me, a flame
The wind cannot blow out, and I shall hold you High in my hand against whatever darkness.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Collected Poems

Happiness, Sadness, Beauty, Thinking

“No, see the slide’s too high. He could fall and get a concussion. (Wulf)
Forget that. He could rack himself on the teeter-totter. (Chris)
Teeter-totter nothing. The swings are a choking hazard. Whose idea was it for him to have this? (Urian)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Idea, Forgetting

“High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived. It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track.”

Scott Westerfeld (1963) American science fiction writer

Source: Midnighters Manga #1

School

“Witch, do this for me,
Find me a moon
made of longing.
Then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high
above my beloved's house,
so that she may look up
tonight
and see it,
and seeing it, sigh for me
as I sigh for her,
moon or no moon.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Housing

“Magnus Bane,” said Magnus. “High Warlock of Brooklyn and Scrabble champion.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: What to Buy the Shadowhunter Who Has Everything

“That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people… That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

People

“Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Sitting high above the city, Father Time realized that knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Understanding, Time

“Sometimes I think high school is one long hazy activity: if you are tough enough to survive this, they'll let you become an adult. I hope it's worth it.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

School, Hope, Thinking

“I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Way

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Answers to Frequently Asked Questions:
Yes.
Yes.
No.
One time in high school.
Three times in my twenties.
Rocks no salt.
Yes.
Four.
Never. And how dare you!
I will take no further questions.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

School, Question, Time

“Fly you high.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Source: Gregor the Overlander Box Set

Flying

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 1. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html (1804) Source: I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud

Tree, Dance

“It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

People, Change

“It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war.”

Aristophanés The Birds

Birds (414 BC) Context: Epops: You're mistaken: men of sense often learn from their enemies. Prudence is the best safeguard. This principle cannot be learned from a friend, but an enemy extorts it immediately. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war. And this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties. Chorus [leader]: It appears then that it will be better for us to hear what they have to say first; for one may learn something at times even from one's enemies. (tr. Anon. 1812 rev. in Ramage 1864, p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=AoUCAAAAQAAJ&pg;=PA45)

War, Learning

“The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.
It was something. Don't say it wasn't.”

Megan Abbott book Dare Me

Source: Dare Me

Life

“Always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will, Sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Life, Smile, Beauty, Heartbreaking

“Just like moons and suns,
With certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Hope, Spring, Sun

“You're my friend, Danny. You understand? There's no debt between friends."
Maybe it's just that the debt gets so high you stop counting it.”

Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer

Understanding

“The Princess Bride
S. Morgenstern's
Classic Tale of True Love
and High Adventure

You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Love, Books, Guy, Chance

“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Age

“I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me: and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
of human cities torture.”

George Gordon Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Source: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Feeling, Mountain

“We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Adams (1774)

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

Philip Larkin book High Windows

Source: High Windows

Sun

“For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Cheating, Box

“I thought I'd pay you a visit, my dear. Since you're so interesting."

My mouth shifted into high gear, leaving my brain behind. "You know, you're the second guy in a few days to call me that. You should be more creative.”

Lilith Saintcrow book Strange Angels

Source: Strange Angels

Guy

“The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Life, School

“The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Sloppy Firsts

School

“when you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

Shoe

“If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
If cool my heart and high my head
I think 'How lucky are the dead.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker

Dreams, Thinking, Suicide, Heart

“After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”

Ann Richards (1933–2006) American politician

Earlier use in Frank and Ernest (c. 1982), by Bob Thaves, as the characters observe a billboard for a "Fred Astaire Film Festival: "Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything that he did… backwards and in high heels."
Quoted in
Misattributed
Context: If you give us the chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels** Keynote address, 1988 Democratic National Convention

For women

“Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?”

Sarah Vowell book The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Source: The Partly Cloudy Patriot (2003)

School, Evil

“Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

History

“Freedom has a high price, as high as that of slavery; the only difference is that you pay with pleasure and a smile, even when that smile is dimmed with tears.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir

Pleasure, Smile, Tear, Freedom

“Is death such a high price to pay, when you will die anyway?”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Circus of the Damned

Source: Circus of the Damned

Death

“I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.”

Stephen King book The Eyes of the Dragon

Source: The Eyes of the Dragon

Friendship, World, Feeling, Flowers

“That was the problem with having walls so hard and high and unscalable…. When they came down, they crumbled completely, shattering into nothingness.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Witchlight

Problem

“I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Dreams, Feeling, Girl

“They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

Hate, School, Star

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

World, Dreams

“Welcome to adulthood," she said. "It sucks as much as high school.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

School, Adulthood

“I never wear flats. My shoes are so high that sometimes when I step out of them, people look around in confusion and ask, "Where'd she go?" and I have to say, "I'm down here.”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

People, Shoe

“And may the odds—" He tosses a berry in a high arc toward me.
I catch it in my mouth and break the delicate skin with my teeth. The sweet tartness explodes across my tongue. "—be ever in your favor!”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Gale Hawthorne and Katniss Everdeen, p. 8
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

“adj.
It has always been my habit, ever since junior high school, to ask that question:
“What are you thinking?”
It is always an act of desperation, and I keep on asking, even though I know it will never work the way I want it to.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

School, Way, Question, Thinking

“High school sucks. People who say those were the best years of your life—those people are liars… Who wants the best years of their life to be in high school? High school is something everybody should be ready to lose.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Forever Princess

Life, People, School

“So, there was this beautiful princess.
She was locked in a high tower(…)She was stuck up there(…)So the only thing was to jump.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Beauty, Princess

“Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Written on the Body

Love

“Maybe someone will know I didn't weave crowns to draw blood; that I faught against mockery;
that I did fill the high tide of my soul with truth.
I repaid vileness with doves.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Truth, Soul, Drawing

“You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything”

Gustave Flaubert book November

Source: November

Love, Heart

“High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: Don't wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than ten feet away, I'll just deal with it when I get there.”

David Sedaris When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Source: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

School

“By the way, my name's Rose Hathaway. I'm seventeen years old, training to protect and kill vampires, in love with a completely unsuitable guy, and have a best friend whose weird magic could drive her crazy.
Hey, no one said high school was easy.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

Love, School, Way, Guy

“I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”
-In the yellow time of pollen”

Luke Davies (1962) Australian writer

Mountain, Water, Time

“It seemed there was always a close correlation between true believers and high body counts.”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

“Love is quite violent. It is so painful at times, so devastating. And there is nothing worse or better. We find the highs and lows equally unbearable. But then again, the absence of them is more so.”

Danielle Steel (1947) American author of romance novels

Love, Pain, Time

“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Imagination, Study

“Don’t take the high ground and assume you already know what you’ll do. The truth is, when it comes to someone you love, you’ll find there isn’t anything you won’t do.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

Love, Truth

“People don't remember me. Really. It's not a paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

People, Lie, Memory

“I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Love

“High high in the hills, high in a pine tree bed.
She's tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant,
Three geese in a flock
one flew east
one flew west
one flew over the cuckoo's nest”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Tree

“In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin.”

Terri Blackstock (1957) American writer

Source: Intervention

Light

“When I am wicked I am in high spirits.”

Henry James book The Europeans

Source: The Europeans

“What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

Tree

“There had to be a circle of Hell where you were eternally fourteen, eternally in junior high. One of the lower circles.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Bloody Bones

Source: Bloody Bones

Hell

“Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

“Ha!' said the tall man drily. 'He was in high luck. Rich old uncles who die are in shockingly short supply.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“… Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.”

Ian Fleming book Goldfinger

Source: Goldfinger

Life, Way, Nature

“Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise.
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree,
Contented that thus far hath been revealed.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

World, Dreams, Thinking

“Prison is like high school with knives.”

Raegan Butcher (1969) American actor and singer

School

“‎"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

Happiness, People, Art

“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

William Black talking with Oskar
"A Simple Solution to an Impossible Problem" (p. 297)
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: "It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

Feeling

“Magnus had heard the story of how the Nephilim were created many times. They must have forgotten to leave out the bit that said: And the Angel descended from on high and gave his chosen ones fantastic abs.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Course of True Love [and First Dates]

Angels, Time

“O Shepherd. You said you would make my feet like hinds' feet and set me upon High Places".

"Well", he answered "the only way to develop hinds' feet is to go by the paths which the hinds use.”

Hannah Hurnard book Hinds' Feet on High Places

Source: Hinds' Feet on High Places

Way