Divergence Cheat Quotes & Sayings

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are "pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours." Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along. — Anne Fadiman

Do not judge others. Be your own judge and you will be truly happy. If you will try to judge others, you are likely to burn your fingers. — Mahatma Gandhi

I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good. — William Shakespeare

The good, we do it; the evil, that is fortune; man is always right, and destiny always wrong. — Jean De La Fontaine

For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change. — William S. Burroughs

All battles are won before they start. — Sun Tzu