Quotes about return
page 4

“Why? Because pride is a strange thing, and because generosity deserves generosity in return. But mostly because it felt like the right thing to do, and that is reason enough.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

“Never lend if you need repayment; never give where you want a return.”

Lindsey Davis (1949) English novelist

Source: The Course of Honor

“Hassan returned the smile. Except his didn’t look forced. And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

People, Smile, Thinking

“Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return.”

Jim Butcher book Changes

Source: Changes

Love, Light

“Whether or not you find your own way, you're bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it's quite rusty.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

Way, Imagination

“The world is full of places to which I want to return”

Ford Madox Ford book The Good Soldier

Source: The Good Soldier

World

“That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

Books, Reality

“Mom and Dad were great, but being asked where I was going every time I left the house - or where I'd been every time I returned - got old quickly.”

Lauren Weisberger book The Devil Wears Prada

Source: The Devil Wears Prada

Moms, Time, Housing

“What is the quality you most like in a man?
The ability to return books.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Books

“One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

God, Soul, Idea, Sea

“Because you can't be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it's always waiting to return. Like the world's sweetest cancer.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Love, World, Waiting

“I am dead. Only vengeance can restore me! Only victory can return my life to me!”

Terry Goodkind book Stone of Tears

Source: Stone of Tears

Life, Victory, Dead

“What was it like… to have someone who knew you would always return and who welcomed you with open arms?”

Kate DiCamillo The Magician's Elephant

Source: The Magician's Elephant

“A sixty - eight, he wants you to go down on him but he won't return the favor. It would be sixty-nine but he owes you one.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

“I wished that love could be simple, that it was always given and returned in the same measure, equally and at the same time, that all the planets aligned in a perfect way to dispel all doubts, that it was easy to understand and never painful.”

Mary E. Pearson (1955) young-adult fiction writer

Source: The Heart of Betrayal

Love, Pain, Way, Understanding

“I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.”

Anaïs Nin book Delta of Venus

Source: Delta of Venus

Love, Feeling, Soul, Hurt

“There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-women; and so one had to become oblivious in the dreams of life.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Pt. 1, ch. 2
Source: Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life, Women, Dreams, Music

“The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.”

Thornton Wilder book The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Love, Idea, Knowledge

“You get what you give, but also what you're willing to take. The night before, I'd offered up my hand. Now, if I held on, there was no telling what it was possible to recieve in return.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

Night

“If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn't seem to return the feeling?… Wear that dress.”

Ann Brashares book Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Love, Guy, Feeling

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“(…): Oh, David, I would trust you with my life! Oh, Jonathan, I would sacrifice my own life for your holy mission! (He almost does): (weeping) David, you must return to me! I need you! I cannot do this thing without you!: Lo, I return!”

Cassandra Clare book The Shadowhunter's Codex

Source: The Shadowhunter's Codex

Life

“Don't let anyone take care of you. Can you maybe leave that for me to do? I mean, take care of you? Feel free to take care of me in return… because I think I'll need you to do that.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: The Piper's Son

Feeling, Thinking

“There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Loss, Time

“Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not,
Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not.
If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive,
Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Love, People, Heart, Hurt

“When life takes away, something of greater value is always given in return.”

Michael J. Fox (1961) Canadian-American actor

Life

“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)
Source: I Have A Dream

Faith, Beauty, Dreams, Hope

“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.”

Homér Iliad

VI. 146–149 (tr. R. Lattimore); Glaucus to Diomed.
Alexander Pope's translation:
: Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground:
Another race the following spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise:
So generations in their course decay;
So flourish these, when those are past away.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Source: The Iliad

Men, Spring, Season

“when I am feeling
low
all i have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Feeling, Cats, Courage

“Consider your own place in the universal oneness of which we are all a part, from which we all arise, and to which we all return.”

David Fontana (1934–2010) British psychologist

Universe, Parting

“He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Fear, Hope

“Shadowhunters don't say good-bye, not before a battle. Or good luck. You must behave as if return is certain, not a matter of chance”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Chance

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

Anthony Bourdain book The Nasty Bits

The Nasty Bits (2006)

Life, World, Beauty, Travel

“Give her a day, and then in return Momma gives you the other 364.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

“Sometimes the only way to know how far you'd come was to return to where you once had been.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

Way

“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return …”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973 - 1976 (1978), p. 280

People, Question

“And you’ll return to real life. You need to live it to the fullest. No matter how shallow and dull things might get, this life is worth living. I guarantee it.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Life

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Love, Truth, Lie, Spring

“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Love, Faith, Confidence, Depressing

“And then there are the rare ones who know love, who understand it. Who freely give of themselves, demanding only a return of that love, that trust.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Every Which Way But Dead

Love, Understanding

“In the beginning, the price of giving great love is risking that it won't be returned. Until you understand, of course, that great love is always returned. With interest.”

Mike Dooley (1961) American writer

Love, Understanding

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong."”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

Pieces of Eight (1982)
Source: Pieces Of Eight

Love, Hate, World

“The great secret of true success, of true happiness, is this: the man or woman who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish person, is the most successful.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Happiness, Secret, Success, Personality

“Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.”

Alice Hoffman book Practical Magic

Source: Practical Magic

Love, Women, Way, Change

“When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

“Love overlooks a person’s faults. That’s not always easy, but love believes the best in every person. Anybody can return evil for evil, but God wants His people to help heal wounded hearts.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Love, God, People, Evil

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

World, Travel, Home, Search

“Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”

Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence

Source: The Enchantress of Florence

Life, Travel

“Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Friendship, Books, Madness

“The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.”

Milan Kundera book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

Time

“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Smile, Exercises, Flowers, Knowledge

“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”

Benjamin Graham book The Intelligent Investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor

“I stay cool, and dig all jive,
That's the way I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
is
Dig and be dug
In return.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

"Motto"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
Variant: My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

Way, Learning

“On my way here I passed a local cinema and it turns out you were expecting me after all, for the billboards read: The Mummy Returns.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Election Rally in Plymouth (22 May, 2001) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108389 <br class="br">Post-Prime Ministerial

Way, Reading

“The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

As quoted in The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs, p. 264
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

“She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Happiness

“So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Pain, Housing

“What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.”

William Blake Songs of Innocence and of Experience

The Divine Image, st. 1
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)
Source: Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Love, Peace

“You’re shaking … so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.”

Elie Wiesel book A Beggar in Jerusalem

Source: A Beggar in Jerusalem

“Out of love,
No regrets--
Though the goodness
Be wasted forever.

Out of love,
No regrets--
Though the return
Be never.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Source: Selected Poems

Love

“I clench his hands to the point of pain. "Stay with me."
His pupils contract to pinpoints, dialate again rapidly, and then return to something resembling normalcy. "Always," he murmurs.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Pain

“Myst hasn't returned yet, But you know that, or else you'd both be naked and fornicating on the front lawn"
"The night's young. Give us time, and it was a field a mile away."

A Valkyrie and Nikolai Wroth pg 322”

Kresley Cole book A Hunger Like No Other

Source: A Hunger Like No Other

Time, Night

“The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

Fear, Decision, Suicide

“I trust you all slept well,” I said, deliberately keeping my tone light. I returned Malich’s glare with a tight-lipped grin.

“Yes, we did,” Kaden answered quickly.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Mary E. Pearson book The Kiss of Deception

Source: The Kiss of Deception

Light

“Dogs have given us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and faith and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made.”

Roger A. Caras (1928–2001) American photographer

Love, Faith, Dogs, Universe

“Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Love, Time, Powerful

“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Life

“Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) Anglo-Irish polar explorer

The first published appearance of this "ad" is on the first page of a 1949 book by Julian Lewis Watkins, The 100 Greatest Advertisements: Who Wrote Them and What They Did. (Moore Publishing Company), except with the Americanized word "honor", rather than "honour".

Men, Success