"The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses."
Read quote
44 likes
Quote collection
Margaret George quotes (page 1 of 2)
29 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance."
Read quote
34 likes
"Kindness is stronger than iron bars."
Read quote
15 likes
"One always imagines that the days that change one’s life must be marked with something extraordinary in nature—storms and lightning, darkness at noon, and so on. In truth they are indistinguishable from any other, which is one reason we feel mocked, as if the world is telling us we are inconsequential."
Read quote
14 likes
"Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine - that is, activity - which could solve it, is seen as odious."
Read quote
6 likes
"It is only when our fate hangs in the balance, when our very life depends on something, that we see whether or not we trust that the rope to which we are clinging will support us. If we do not, then we let of of the ledge and swing on it with our full weight."
Read quote
6 likes
"Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths."
Read quote
6 likes
"The cure for a broken heart is simple, my lady. A hot bath and a good night's sleep."
Read quote
6 likes
"Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides."
Read quote
5 likes
"Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss."
Read quote
4 likes
"We are more than our bodies, it is true; but we cannot be divorced from them. They are us, and the only way in which we can see one another. Perhaps the gods are above this, but in their mercy, they have given us the guise of bodies."
Read quote
3 likes
"What is one person's diversion may be another's supreme test."
Read quote
3 likes
"Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths."
Read quote
3 likes
"Defeat I can endure with cheerfulness, my lady. But betrayal is like taking the wind from my sails, or the earth from beneath my feet. It chills my spirits like a rainy day, and all I can do is draw the curtains and cry into my pillow."
Read quote
3 likes
"I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church."
Read quote
3 likes
"Mary awoke from her nightmare with a pounding heart, convinced that she had only imagined Elizabeth's cruel plot. A full moon was shining into her chamber, illuminating everything around her in silvery light. That was when she noticed for the first time that there were bars on her window."
Read quote
3 likes
"Lying in bed, half-covered by the blankets, I would drowsily ask why he had come to my door that night long ago. It had become a ritual for us, as it does for all lovers: where, when, why? remember...I understand even old people rehearse their private religion of how they first loved, most guarded of secrets. And he would answer, sleep blurring his words, "Because I had to." The question and the answer were always the same. Why? Because I had to."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are always tortured by our memory of the last time we were with anyone, what we said, what we did not say."
Read quote
3 likes
"Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is almost impossible to describe happiness, because at the time it feels entirely natural, as if all the rest of your life has been the aberration; only in retrospect does it swim into focus as the rare and precious thing it is. When it is present, it seems to be eternal, abiding forever, and there is no need to examine it or clutch it. Later, when it has evaporated, you stare in dismay at your empty palm, where only a little of the perfume lingers to prove that once it was there, and now is flown."
Read quote
3 likes