Quotes about likeness
page 95

“I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.”

Jerry Spinelli (1941) American children's writer

“A lot of people like to do certain things, but they're not
that good at it. Keep going through the things that you like
to do, until you find something that you actually seem to be
extremely good at. It can be anything.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

People

“The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”

Joyce Carol Oates book Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Source: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Time

“If it looks like a Dwarf, and it smells like a Dwarf, then it's probably a Dwarf or a latrine wearing dungerees.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Lost Colony

“It is these black clothes," said Strange. "I am like a leftover piece of funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange y el señor Norrell

People, Thinking, Clothes

“You should take more pride in your appearance,” I tell him. “You'll never attract girls with an ugly mug like that.”

Darren Shan book Lord Loss

Source: Lord Loss

Girl, Appearance

“You're not afraid I'll kill you tonight?"
"Like I couldn't take you.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

“We born dyin'… But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.”

Walter Mosley (1952) American writer

Source: The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Cats, Silence

“what i really want - and what i never get - is to be appreciated. do you know what it’s like to work so hard to make sure everyone’s happy, and to have not a single person recognize it”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Happiness, Personality

“Ian sighed wanly. "I once had the means to be gaga over art–before I found myself in a country where the standard of beauty is toaster waffles shaped like cartoon characters.”

Gordon Korman book The Medusa Plot

Source: The Medusa Plot

Beauty, Art, Country

“If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Life, Thinking, Learning

“I never met a lasagna I didn't like”

Jim Davis (1945) American cartoonist and creator of Garfield

“It's like Brad Pitt for us. You might not like blond men with pretty features, but c'mon, it's Brad. You're not going to kick him out of bed for eating crackers.”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Men

“When a man is that special, you know it sooner than you think possible. You recognize it instinctively, and you're certain that no matter what happens, there will never be another one like him.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Lucky One

Source: The Lucky One

Thinking

“I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

Secret, Perfection, Box

“We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

People

“Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Beauty

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Peace, Feeling, Knowledge, Joy

“I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense…. But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.”

Georgette Heyer (1902–1974) British historical romance and detective fiction novelist

Literature, Thinking

“That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

Happiness, Secret

“Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Beauty

“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Waiting, Sun

“You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Source: Sula

Love

“My dreams had to be His dreams, the ones He placed in my heart. They couldn't be the ones I thought I should have, or needed for the purpose of making other people like me.”

Stormie Omartian (1942) American writer

Source: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing

People, Dreams, Heart

“A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Thinking

“I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Sense, Passion, Parting

“I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative. I don't like anything in the mainstream and they don't like me.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

“If he'd looked like a cross between Mr. Clooney and, say, one of the hobbits, I probably would have been far more capable of coherent thought.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

“A mind is like a puzzle; you must unlock it to read its hidden secrets.”

Melissa de la Cruz book Masquerade

Source: Masquerade

Secret, Reading

“Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

Love, People, History, Perfection

“You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.'

How?'

Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

Thinking

“He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

Love, Feeling

“I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Past, Forgetting

“She was starting to feel a little like a hamburger at a dieters’ convention. Nobody was likely to snack on her, but absolutely everybody noticed she was edible.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Black Dawn

Feeling

“We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes — the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
Source: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

Nature

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Art, Imagination

“I feel like a visitor that got left behind by his ride.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Feeling

“A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Heart

“Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.”

Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance

Source: A Fine Balance

Death, Beauty, Birth

“Do I look like the kind of person who wastes time turning goats into pin cushions?”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

Time, Personality

“… you don't have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Bookends

Waiting, Future

“She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 130

Love, Knowledge

“Emotions were like wild horses and it required wisdom to be able to control them”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Wisdom, Horse

“Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning
Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

Part II, section 1.
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847)

Spring, Water, Heart

“Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They are not like aches or wounds; they are more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there is not enough material.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Babylon Revisited

"Babylon Revisited"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Family, Family

“You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.”

Celeste Ng book Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Source: Everything I Never Told You

Happiness, Smile, Feeling

“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

People, Art

“Oh, good grief! I’ve never had a man pick me up before and not grunt like he’s dying. I’m in heaven. Marry me, Ash, please! (Pam)
I would say yes, but I come with more baggage than even Samsonite can cover. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

“But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“There is no religion without love,
and people may talk as much as
they like about their religion, but
if it does not teach them to be good
and kind to man and beast,
it is all a sham.”

Anna Sewell book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty (1877), Ch. XIII, p. 66

Love, People, Religion

“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

Family, Water, Memory

“If she kissed him, would he taste like blood or cloves or a mixture of the two?”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Kiss

“I see colors like you hear jet planes.”

Dave Eggers book How We Are Hungry

Source: How We Are Hungry

Color

“But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Sea

“Every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I've got in my hand and rub it into his face. That's how much I like him.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Goodbye Tsugumi

Source: Goodbye Tsugumi

Time

“Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi')”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

Life, Grass

“Your lips are like sugar
And your cheeks an apple
Your breasts are paradise
And your body a lily.

O, to kiss the sugar
To bite the apple
To reveal paradise
And open the lily.”

Louis De Bernières book Birds Without Wings

Source: Birds Without Wings

Kiss

“You ever notice that people who believe in creationism look really unevolved? Eyes real close together, big furry hands and feet. "I believe God created me in one day." Yeah, looks like he rushed it.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Arizona Bay (1997)

God, People

“Honest to god, Clare, you act like the dress is more important than you being shot!”
Of course it is! It’s a Versace, you idiot! Bring help! I’m going to save this dress at all costs.” - Sam to Clare”

Katie MacAlister (1964) Author

Source: Even Vampires Get the Blues

God, Help

“You can always trust a dog that likes peanut butter.”

Kate DiCamillo book Because of Winn-Dixie

Source: Because of Winn-Dixie

Dogs

“And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

Source: The Sound and the Fury

Water, Time

“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Sense

“Her joy with him was like nothing she had ever experienced. His love for her felt like a miracle.”

Elizabeth Chandler (1954) writer

Source: Evercrossed

Love, Joy

“Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

“You know how the bonds of family are, my lady… They cling as tightly as vines. And sometimes, like vines, they cling tightly enough to kill.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Family

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Acknowledgements, p. 549
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Books, Idea, Bee, Reading

“See there?" Jem was scowling triumphantly. "Nothin' to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl its mortifyin”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Girl, Scouting

“Just wait a second. We can't leave it like this." But this too, wasn't true. Leaving was easy. It was everything else that was so damned hard.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

Waiting

“When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.”

Joseph Boyden book Through Black Spruce

Source: Through Black Spruce

People, Thinking

“Magnus hoped if he ever went mad like that himself, so mad that he poisoned the very air round him and hurt everyone he came into contact with, that there would be someone ho loved him enough to stop him. To kill him, if it came to that.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Saving Raphael Santiago

Love, Hope, Hurt, Madness

“It is like having a book out from the library.
It is like constantly having a book out from the library.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Self-Help

Books

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans… are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

Source: Kitchen Confidential

“He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

Beauty, Loyalty

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

Feeling, Suffering, Passion, Patience

“Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent.”

Laurie Notaro American writer

Source: There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble

Personality

“Butch nodded as if he knew exactly what was doing. "Like I said, my man, it's whatever. You and me? Same as always, no matter who you screw. Although… if you're into sheep, that would be tough. Don't know if I could handle that.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Unbound

Source: Lover Unbound

“Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there’s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

People, Stupidity, Thinking, Time

“Achilles makes a sound like choking. “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.” His spearpoint flies in a dark whirlwind, bright as the evening-star, to catch the hollow at Hector’s throat.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Men, Star

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Happiness

“Now I don't know why he's denying them habeas corpus. I can only assume the guys they got detained over there did something really unforgivable. Like remind Obama he was once a professor of Constitutional Law.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Law, Guy

“Like a mermaid rising from an ocean of paper, the girl emerged across the room.”

Brian Selznick book The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Source: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Girl

“He stared at his hot chocolate like it held the secret to the universe.”

Lilith Saintcrow book Strange Angels

Source: Strange Angels

Secret, Universe

“Today he wore a burnt-orange shirt, black pants, and a tie that looked like a street fight at the south end of the color wheel.”

Kathy Reichs book Monday Mourning

Source: Monday Mourning

Color, Fight

“I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Memory

“There's nothing like a mission to save the world to liven up a vacation.”

Donita K. Paul (1950) American writer

Source: DragonQuest

World

“The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”

Michel Houellebecq Soumission

Source: Soumission

Happiness, Peace, Beauty, Suffering

“Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person's heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Feeling, Imagination, Time, Heart

“When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

Source: Not A Star

Happiness, Sadness, Feeling, Memory

“But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Life, Happiness, Sadness, Feeling

“When a decision like that is made by a government, it emboldens those who are already prejudiced to speak their deepest thoughts of hate. They assume they are simply brave enough to say what everyone really thinks.”

Cassandra Clare book Lord of Shadows

Source: Lord of Shadows

Hate, Thinking, Decision

“[S]he leans into this guy and rocks her head like I’m making this music for her, when if I could, I would take it all away and give her as much silence as she’s given me pain.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Pain, Music, Guy, Silence

“One way to define wisdom is the ability to see, into the future, the consequences of your choices in the present. That ability can give you a completely different perspective on what the future might look like.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Source: The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective

Wisdom, Way, Future

“Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think thoughts, they are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Everything sent out returns to the source - you.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Thinking, Universe

“More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Asfixia

Feeling

“the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“I'm afraid I couldn't like him without a spice of human naughtiness.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

“Love and anger are like land and sea: They meet at many different places.”

Patricia A. McKillip book The Changeling Sea

Source: The Changeling Sea

Love, Sea, Anger

“I don't know why men like to barbecue so much. Maybe its the only thing they can cook. Or maybe they're just closet pyromaniacs.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: P.S. I Love You

Men, Cooking

Quotes about likeness page 95

Quotes about likeness
page 95