She Believed Quotes & Sayings

She had come out tonight because she believed there had to be a present tense, somewhere, and she'd followed Gav and Barnesy because she'd hoped they knew where it was. Is. And they'd dragged her to yet another haunted house. Where was the now? In bloody America, probably, apart from the bit that Tucker lived in, or in bloody Tokyo. In any case, it was somewhere else. How could people who didn't live in bloody America or bloody Tokyo stand it, all that swimming around in the past imperfect? — Nick Hornby

He reaches for a few strands of my hair, twining them around his finger. "You busy later?"
"I was supposed to go to a meet-and-greet in Fairport with Mom, but I told her I needed to study for SATs."
"She believed this? It's summer, Sam."
"Nan's got me signed up for this crazy prep simulation. And . . . I might have told Mom when she was a little distracted."
"But not intentionally, of course."
"Of course not," I say.
"So if I were to come see you after eight, you'd be studying."
"Absolutely. But I might want a . . . study buddy. Because I might be grappling with some really tough problems."
"Grappling, huh?"
"Tussling with," I say. "Wrestling. Handling."
"Gotcha. Sounds like I should bring protective gear to study with you." Jase grins at me.
"You're pretty tough. You'll be fine. — Huntley Fitzpatrick

She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it. — David Nicholls

Maude meant nothing that she said. She knew how pretty she looked in furs. She was a rattle, not understanding her own bnoise; but the scholar hung upon her words, and believed them inspired, and did not know they were murmurings from a shell. — Ernest G. Henham

Jem's knees gave out, and he sank to the trunk at the foot of his bed, still playing. He played Will breathing the name Cecily, and he played himself watching the glint of his own ring on Tessa's hand on the train from York, knowing it was all a charade, knowing, too, that he wished that it wasn't. He played the sorrow in Tessa's eyes when she had come into the music room after Will had told her she would never have children. Unforgivable, that, what a thing to do, and yet Jem had forgiven him. Love was forgiveness, he had always believed that, and the things that Will did, he did out of some bottomless well of pain. Jem did not know the source of that pain, but he knew it existed and was real, knew it as he knew of the inevitability of his own death, knew it as he knew that he had fallen in love with Tessa Gray and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it. — Cassandra Clare

He saw a figure in white robes near the bridge entrance and turned the tape over in his hand. He approached the woman and said, his tone respectful, "Your Highness. The transmission we received..."
The woman looked toward him. He'd seen her face many times before, knew it well. She was young, seemed younger every day, even as her responsibilities grew and grew.
He held out his hand. Childlike fingers took the tape.
"What is it they've sent us?" he asked.
Prince Leia Organa looked at him as if he'd placed another burden on her shoulders - another responsibility to add to a count of thousands - and she was proud to bear it.
"Hope," she said.
Raymus believed her. — Alexander Freed

I am a pretty, useless ornament who always believed she'd have a man to take care of her. — V.C. Andrews

Brunetti shrugged. They believed him to be a member of the community of scholars...'Community of Scholars," she repeated , "It would make the chickens laugh — Donna Leon

What are you good at?" asked the owner.
"Going after what I believe in." That was the only possible reply; she had spent her life in pursuit of what she believed in. The only problem was that she believed in something different everyday. — Paulo Coelho

Too many cold, hungry nights had taught her a special kind of practicality, but in that moment, she believed in his magic. — Laura Trentham

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. — Edmund White

She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself - believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all. — George MacDonald

I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: Not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen. — Philippa Gregory

She was beautiful in the way people call the desert beautiful, which is to say that although some people actually believed it, most of the time it was said in response to someone else's denigration of it. — Chris McCormick

They were childless - Dan Needham suggested that their sexual roles might be so "reversed" as to make childbearing difficult - and their attendance at Little League games was marked by a constant disapproval of the sport: that little girls were not allowed to play in the Little League was an example of sexual stereotyping that exercised the Dowlings' humorlessness and fury. Should they have a daughter, they warned, she would play in the Little League. They were a couple with a theme - sadly, it was their only theme, and a small theme, and they overplayed it, but a young couple with such a burning mission was quite interesting to the generally slow, accepting types who were more typical in Gravesend. Mr. Chickering, our fat coach and manager, lived in dread of the day the Dowlings might produce a daughter. Mr. Chickering was of the old school - he believed that only boys should play baseball, and that girls should watch them play, or else play soft-ball. — John Irving

Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details. — Isabel Allende

She had never been beautiful- she had known that from the start- but she would like to have been loved, above all things. She would have to settle for being liked, perhaps for being trusted, respected. Best of all would have been to have had the courage to stand up for herself and fight for what she believed in. — Anne Perry

She walked through the underpass at the Elephant and Castle, enjoying the sense that nothing really mattered, not the truth about the past, nor whether they believed her, not Winnie's drinking or Vik's ultimatum. It was the perfect place to escape from a painful past. She could waste years at home trying to make sense of a random series of events. There was no meaning, no lessons to be learned, no moral - none of it meant anything. She could spend her entire life trying to weave meaning into it, like compulsive gamblers and their secret schema. Nothing mattered, really, because an anonymous city is the moral equivalent of a darkened room. She understood why Ann had come here and stayed here and died here. It wouldn't be hard. All she had to do was let go of home. She would phone Leslie and Liam sometimes, say she was fine, fine, let the calls get farther apart, make up a life for herself and they'd finally forget. — Denise Mina

Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that it would have come to her on the windswept platform of an electric tram. — E. M. Forster

Many truths which are not believed are called lies,' the Laughing Beast said. 'Mirrors do not themselves lie unless they have been enchanted. Ordinary mirrors merely reflect what is revealed to them. People lie and mirrors reflect people. If your mother feared mirrors in your land, she feared herself. — Isobelle Carmody

Antonelli? you mean that little slave girl?
I'll be damned. i guess we can't really call you that though can we? No, Federica's grandbaby isn't a slave. she's family.
what did you just say Gia?
I said she's Federica's grandbaby. what you didn't know?
No, I knew , but how did you?
Antonio told me ages ago. He was planing to kill that salamander when he found out, but he never got the chance.
why didn't you ever say anything?
You never asked, Besides, you all think I'm crazy, anyway. Would you have believed me?
No I probably wouldn't have. — J.M. Darhower

That the Beast was a person, Bryony did not even question, but then, she believed on some level that Fumblefoot was a person, and Blackie the goat, and the neighbor's large and grumpy tomcat. It was not that she was sentimental about animals. Chickens, for example, were not people. You looked into a chicken's eyes and you saw the back of their skulls. — T. Kingfisher

[When asked if she believed in "women's lib":] Not really. Not when I see what most of them look like. — Greta Garbo

And suddenly the miracle happens. I look across at the woman who has just made some coffee and is now reading the newspaper, whose eyes look tired and desperate, who is her usual silent self, who does not always show her affection in gestures, the woman who made me say yes when i wanted to say no, who forced me to fight for what she, quiet rightly, believed was my reason for living, who let me set off alone because her love for me was greater even than her love for herself, who made me go in serch of my dream,; and suddenly, seeing that small, quiet woman, whose eyes said more than words, who was often terrified inside, but always courageous in her actions, who could love someone without humbling herself and who never ever apologized for fighting for her man - suddenly. my fingers press down on the keys. — Paulo Coelho

She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her. — Mary Papas

Some moments I believed Max could've easily been Red Riding Hood's wolf. But she probably would have liked it. — Shannon Delany

He loved her. He'd said it, and even though she couldn't quite believe it, she believed *him*. — Julia Quinn

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas. — Junot Diaz

Margaret Thatcher was fearful of German unification because she believed that this would bring an immediate and formidable increase of economic strength to a Germany which was already the strongest economic partner in Europe. — Douglas Hurd

Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either — Garrison Keillor

He said he believed in one true love, and that she was it for him. She was his person. — Jay McLean

No woman kills herself for love, and rarely for shame. It is the cruelty of hope that does a woman in; for no matter how many men a woman has given herself to, she never holds her life cheap until she foolishly believed it to be valued. — Sheri Holman

She'd believed in the promises of the '60s, after all, even if she'd participated only indirectly. Hadn't they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they'd made at twenty? — Garth Risk Hallberg

Absurdly, irrationally, she believed that music could make a difference to the temper of the world.She did not investigate this belief, test it to see whether it made sense;she simply believed it, and so she chose music that expressed order and healing:Bach for order, Mozart for healing. — Alexander McCall Smith

Beauvoir left their home wanting to call his wife and tell her how much he loved her, and then tell her what he believed in, and his fears and hopes and disappointments. To talk about something real and meaningful. He dialed his cell phone and got her. But the words got caught somewhere south of his throat. Instead he told her the weather had cleared, and she told him about the movie she'd rented. Then they both hung up. — Louise Penny

It was respect she had for feelings, how she believed it was inimical to the soul to deny them. — Sue Monk Kidd

They believed their friendships thrived because they had raised some expectations and lowered others. They had come to expect loyalty and good wishes from each other, but not constant attention. If a friend didn't return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn't mean she was angry or backing away from the friendship; she was likely just exhausted from her day. — Jeffrey Zaslow

She got out and shut the door without looking back, picking her way through the snow to the black wooden door in the college wall. At least she hadn't told him not to follow. He watched as she carefully brushed the snow off the latch with her rolled umbrella before touching it with her suede gloves. She left the door half open behind her. He followed. When he reached the door he saw she had paused on the garden path leading to her hall and was doing something in the snow with the tip of her umbrella. Still not looking back, she moved on without waiting for him. When he reached the spot he saw that she had written 'I love you' in the snow. It was that night, he believed ever after, that she became pregnant. — Alan Judd

Nothing moves me more than courage: so total a sacrifice deserved complete trust from me. But she never believed that I trusted her, since she did not suspect how much I distrusted others. In spite of appearances to the contrary, I do not regret having yielded to Sophie as much as it lay in my nature to do; at the first glance I had caught sight of something in her incorruptible, with which one could make a compact as sure, and as dangerous, as with an element itself. Fire may be trusted, provided one knows that its law is to burn, or die. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Ask any dreamer, it's not an easy road,
But to them; they never questioned, what they'd always known. — Nikki Rowe

She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn't fair. People didn't have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That's what she believed. That's how it was. — Tim Winton

Someone I talked to who covered auto racing for a lot of years said she believed there was a 60 percent chance that Junior qualified with a car not quite up to code and people looked the other way because there's no points involved [with the pole]. — Tony Kornheiser

She looked out then, through the crowd, and saw Simon with the Lightwoods, looking at her across the empty space that separated them. It was the same way that Jace had looked at her at the manor. It was the one thread that bound these two boys that she loved so much, she thought, their one commonality: They both believed in her even when she didn't believe in herself. — Cassandra Clare

Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow. — Gregory Maguire

It wasn't that she expected to be known by all the bank's employees; it was just that she had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless. — Denis Johnson

Blue had never believed in death until then. Not in a real way. It happened to other people, other families, in other places. It happened in hospitals or automobile crashes or battle zones. It happened
now she remembered Gansey's words outside Gwenllian's tomb
with ceremony. With some announcement of itself. It didn't just happen in the attic on a sunny day while she was sitting in the reading room. It didn't just HAPPEN, in only a moment, an irreversible moment. It didn't happen to people she had always known. But it did. And there would now forever be two Blues: the Blue that was before, and the Blue that was after. The one who didn't believe, and the one who did. — Maggie Stiefvater

She raised a sharp eyebrow at him. "Vlad, no offense, but look at you. If you're not a vampire, you're clearly the most anemic goth I've ever seen." ... "We believed you. Because that's what friends do."
pg267 October to Vlad — Heather Brewer

That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been - no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was not one that could be freely discussed even among intimates, but it was understood without saying that if women began to yield for such reasons as that, marriage and society would not last long. Any man who spoke up for Mrs Dempster probably believed in Free Love. Certainly he associated sex with pleasure, and that put him in a class with filthy thinkers like Cece Athelstan. — Robertson Davies

With a boot on his chest, she used her free hand to search for the syringe he surely carried. Found it. Jabbed it into his thigh. Waited with the gun to his head until his eyes shut and his jaw went slack. Punched him just to be sure. The sedative would have been measured to heavily dose Neeva and her nearly half-weight to his, but at this point, what the fuck ever.
A group of pedestrians on the other side of the street had watched the entire scene. Munroe waved them on. "It's official business," she said, and whether they believed her or not, they moved on. Human nature was always more inclined to apathy, to avoiding
involvement, to seeing things as someone else's problem. People were easy like that. — Taylor Stevens

What totally different feelings did Emma take back into the house from what she had brought out!- she had then been only daring to hope for a little respite of suffering;- she was now in an exquisite site fluttering of happiness moreover as she believed must still be greater when the flutter should have passed away — Jane Austen

Her imperturbable self-confidence (Duchesse de Maine) caused Madame de Stael to write that the Duchesse believed in herself the same way she believed in God, without explanation or discussion. — Antonia Fraser

She cursed Lovingdon for not taking her problem seriously, but then she supposed it wasn't truly a serious problem. No one would go hungry, be without shelter, or die because of her choice. And if she didn't choose, her parents weren't likely to disown her. She supposed she could live very happily without a husband, but it was the absence of love that was troubling. As far as she knew, no one had ever been madly, deeply, passionately in love with her. She believed that a woman should experience the mad rush of unbridled passion at least once in her lifetime. Was she being greedy to want it permanently? — Lorraine Heath

She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of silt that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which, taking root, would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from within. — Leo Tolstoy

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. — Virginia Woolf

He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty which dismissed all opposition. — Terry Pratchett

All of which Flora said with so much headlong vehemence as if she really believed it. There is not much doubt that when she worked herself into full mermaid condition, she did actually believe whatever she said in it. — Charles Dickens

It wasn't that she believed in voodoo, precisely - but she believed in the people who believed in voodoo - and that was scary enough.

-Coralee Ayers — Caitlin Rush

Narinder Kaur had been told the story so often she believed it must be her earliest memory: that she was four years old when she'd sprinted out of their Croydon semi and straight into the road. The car braked just in time. But the funny thing was that the car belonged to a reverend, on his way to open the church, and the reason Narinder had run out of the house in the first place was because her mother had said they needed to hurry, that God was waiting for them. In other words, God, sick of waiting, had come directly to Narinder. — Sunjeev Sahota

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel grinder that Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it could all be snatched away. — Jodi Picoult

...the terrible though occurred to her that perhaps she'd always unconsciously believed that because Sam didn't cry, he therefore didn't feel, or he felt less, not as profoundly or deeply as she did. Her focus had always been on how his actions affected her feelings, as if his role was to do things for her, to her, and all that mattered was her emotional response to him, as if a "man" were a product or service, and she'd finally chosen the right brand to get the right response. Was it possible she'd never seen or truly loved him the way he deserved to be loved? As a person? An ordinary, flawed, feeling person? — Liane Moriarty

Emily just knew that the grocery store clerk's cousin had slipped on a bath mat and fallen out a second-story open window only to be saved because the woman landed on a discarded mattress.
But what interested Emily most about the incident was how the cousin had subsequently met a man in physical therapy who introduced her to his half brother who she ended up marrying and then running over with her car a year later after a heated argument. And that man, it was discovered, had been the one to dump the mattress in her yard.
He'd saved her so that she could later cripple him.
Emily found that not ironic but intriguing.
Because everything, she believed, was connected. — Holly Goldberg Sloan

Somehow I believed it was my obligation to try to do the right thing by her because she had given birth to me. — D.G. Kaye

Someone told me at the beginning of that summer that I would come face-to-face with death because of a Romeo and Juliet romance, I would never have believed it. But it wasn't like that summer went at all like I had planned in the first place. The Columbia recruiter sat across from me, her dark bushy eyebrows rising as high as they could go while she stared down at my application. "So, Alex, I see that you don't have any extracurricular activities." I shrugged. I was sitting in one of those uncomfortable orange plastic chairs in the guidance counselor's office, wishing I could just disappear. I was the first student in all of Winnebago High School's history to have a recruiter from an Ivy League school visit. By the way she looked at our tiny school with its ancient, chipped walls and rusted lockers, I could see why nobody had wanted to visit in the past. — Magan Vernon

His name was Anderson and he had little gift for communication. Like most technicians, he had a
terror and a contempt for speculation. The inductive leap was not for him. He dug a step and pulled himself up one single step, the way a man climbs the last shoulder of a mountain. He had great contempt, born of fear, for the Hamiltons, for they all half believed they had wings - and they got some bad falls that way.
Anderson never fell, never slipped back, never flew. His steps moved slowly, slowly upward, and in the end, it is said, he found what he wanted - color film. He married Una, perhaps, because she had little humor, and this reassured him. Una wrote bleak letters without joy but also without self-pity. She was well and she hoped her family was well. — John Steinbeck

To be studious was to be the opposite of boring, she had believed; it was to be so interested, so madly curious, that one simply could not wait for the answers to arrive on their own: one had to go chase them in the only manner available. — Meredith Duran

What?"
"I said, Are you dangerous?"
I wasn't sure I heard her correctly. "Who? me? No, I'm not dangerous at all."
"You promise?"
"Sure."
"All right, then," she said. "You can get in."
And that was how I met the unsinkable, irrepressible, wholly undeniable Kikumi Otsugi, a woman who believed in bad men, but not bad dishonest men. I had given her my word of honor that I would not harm her, and she was satisfied. — Will Ferguson

I never wanted to be the one to break her heart, to disappoint her, to be late for dinner or to hog the bed. I never wanted to be the person to make her cry, or turn out to be a huge let-down. She meant to much to me for any of that. While I believed I could love her better than anyone in the world, I didn't really trust myself to be ... Well, good enough. — Jessica Thompson

He understood that she'd always believed herself cursed, his angel. That she lived on stolen time. That she deserved nothing.. — Joey W. Hill

I smiled. She smiled. I believed the smile. — John Green

Tell me your deepest secret," she said softly ...
After a long moment, he spoke. "The only secret I've borne my entire life is that I love you." He gave her a slight smile. "It was the one thing I believed I'd go to the grave without voicing." His eyes were so full of light that their loveliness almost stopped her heart. — Sarah J. Maas

She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them. — Tommy Wallach

Bad dogs, she believed, were like most bad children: created by those around them. But then, that was a personal opinion. — Heather Graham

I thought she was the funniest woman, and I believed being a comedian was the most exciting thing you could be. — Maya Rudolph

When she spoke his name, Beloved, he believed she meant it. He spoke of an adolescence I envied. Pampered, praised, educated . . . any child's dream. But we all awake from dreams. — Robin Hobb

She Believed She Could So She Did. — Rogena Mitchell-Jones

As a devout Baptist, she believed it was a sin to pray for anything for yourself. You ought to pray only for strength to bear whatever the Lord saw fit to send you, she thought. I was never able to follow this advice, for although I would often feel a sense of uneasiness over the tone of my prayers, I was the kind of person who prayed frantically-Please, God, please, please, PLEASE let Ross MacVey like me better than Mavis. — Margaret Laurence

Elle had gone off in another direction and made him swear to 'whatever twisted deity he believed in' that he wasn't going to follow her. Really made him wonder where the hell she was going. — Sharon Stevenson

It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She'd believed in forever in her twenties, when Gray had said it, meaning every word, and she'd believed in forever in her thirties, when William had said it, lying through his teeth. But she'd lived long enough to know that forever couldn't be guaranteed to anyone. Even tomorrow couldn't be relied upon. — Lisa Scottoline

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an athiest. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Prayer, at its most basic level, was surrender. Like Jesus in the garden, saying, "Not My will, but Yours, be done." The ironic thing was, when a person surrendered their will, they got God's, and then they received what they were really looking for all along. This was what she believed. — Chris Fabry

Jack believed in something - he believed in white witches and sleighs pulled by wolves, and in the world the trees obscured. He believed that there were better things in the woods. He believed in palaces of ice and hearts to match. Hazel had, too. Hazel had believed in woodsmen and magic shoes and swanskins and the easy magic of a compass. She had believed that because someone needing saving they were savable. She had believed in these things, but not anymore. And this is why she had to rescue Jack, even though he might not hear what she had to tell him. — Anne Ursu

I think of the New Testament story of the woman with an issue of blood--specifically of her hand reaching out into the clutter and chaos of a crowd, not sure that she would reach Christ, but nevertheless reaching for him in hope. Her story is sacred to me because she truly believed that by reaching outside of the bounds that her culture had set for her--perhaps even the bounds she had set for herself--she could be made whole. — Ashley Mae Hoiland

Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume to correct attitude to her unchosen faith. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as taking pride in it. — Milan Kundera

I loved her, Eric. So much. And she died. I only get the general sense of things and they pass so quickly, like childhood smells touching you and then being gone on the breeze. But. But but but. It feels strange to be writing this down - I think I believed I could change what happened, undo it, prevent it, save her life somehow after she was already gone. Of course I couldn't. Dead is dead is dead. — Steven Hall

She trusted God, and she believed His plan for her life was far greater than anything she could dream up for herself. — Krista Noorman

Until that morning when we all went to the riverbank, I still believed Mother would take Leah, not me. Leah who, even in her malarial stupor, rushed forward to crouch with the battery in the canoe and counter its odd tilt. I was outshone was usual by her heroism. But as we watched that pirogue drift away across the Kwenge, Mother gripped my hand so tightly I understood that I had been chosen. She would drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act as a mother. I think probably it was. — Barbara Kingsolver

Leonora is the grownups' version of Cinderella. She doesn't take crap from any ugly stepsisters. She doesn't sit indoors waiting to be rescued by prince charming. Oh, no, she rescues prince charming, Florestan, who's locked up in a dungeon by his archenemy, Pizarro. Cinderella was fun when we were little girls, played with dolls and believed in passive fairytales. Now that we're grown women who play with toys, it's only fit to believe in active fairytales. — Luella Christie

Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?"
"Why, no," she said. "Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them - and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We're married now. I'm not going anywhere." And she meant it. He was her husband, her lover, her prince.
Thronos was her best friend.
Though she worried what tomorrow would bring, she believed in them.
As he was drifting off, he said, "With all my dreams having come true, what will I dream of now?"
Oh, damn. Lanthe gazed at his face in sleep. I just fell in love with him. — Kresley Cole

But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. — Claire Messud

Opening his eyes, gazing at the vastness above, below, and all around, J.D. inquired, "Do you believe in immortality?" as casually as if inquiring if she believed in free trade. "I don't know. Do you?" "I don't know either. I want terribly to believe that there's a chance for such happiness as this to be carried on somehow, somewhere, if not in this life, then in the next. — Olive Higgins Prouty

When she told me how Phil had built a platform that hung five feet from the floor by thick chains to hold the drummer's kit, I nearly died. He'd built it because he believed that drums should be recorded from — Mick Fleetwood

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves. — Charles De Lint

He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed. — Anne Lamott

She had been adamant, that she had not believed — Harriet Smart

He was angry with himself for having kissed her and enjoyed it, only to be disappointed by her in the end.
He knew that love was never simple, but it was even less so for a vampire.
He shook his head in disbelief as he walked away. He had really thought that she was the one for him and had genuinely believed that he
was going to spend the rest of his life with her, but now, he knew better. — Elaine White

I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, and apart. — Sylvia Plath

Most of me believed she wouldn't show up today, but a small part of me still held out hope. I can't say that her choice has broken my heart, because that would mean my heart was still whole to be broken. — Colleen Hoover