TTT – Top Ten Quotes About Life

If you scroll through my blog, you’ll probably find that I have a….slight obsession with quotes. I love them. I made a year long planner where I had a quote for every single day. I scatter quotes where ever I can squeeze them in! So when I saw the prompt for this week, I got SO EXCITED…but then I realized I had to narrow down my favorites into 10. Now, my title says these quotes are about life, but to be more specific, these are quotes that have resonated with my life, ones that I’ve taken as advice, that I try and live by, or ones that have helped me through some dark days. So, in a way, they are quotes about life…my life…but that does still count! So here’s hoping that these quotes resonate with you, too.

Top Ten Tuesday is brought to you by:
That Artsy Reader Girl

You could rattle the stars. You could do anything, if you only dared. And deep down, you know it too, and that’s what scares you the most.

Sarah J Maas, Throne of Glass

I think that SJM has some AWESOME quotes… Her books just have so many lines that hold their own. I actually love this quote so much that I put it on my grad cap when I graduated earlier this month!

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle In Time

I’ve always loved analogies and poetry, so this one has always stuck with me. I love the rules and structures of poetry, so applying that to life makes sense for me.

At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.

Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

You must learn to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.

Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

I absolutely love the book City of Girls. I think it is easily the most quotable book I’ve read – I could easily fill up this whole post with ten quotes from this book…but where would the fun in that be? I chose two of my favorites, but I highly recommend looking at some of the other quotes from this book, especially if you identify as female. This book just…IS the female experience in a lot of ways, and it has a lot of good advice and tidbits scattered throughout.

Perhaps bravery is simply the face humanity wraps around its collective madness.

Illuminae, Amy Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

This one may seem like a weird choice for a list of quotes about life, but all my life I’ve dealt with severe anxiety, and it wasn’t until I was almost in college that I realized that not everyone felt that way all the time. I read this book, and this quote stuck with me. We’re all mad here, in our own ways.

Someone else’s choice doesn’t change who you are.

Red, White, and Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston

I grew up in an evangelical Christian household, and like all kids, really, most of my formative years, decisions were made for me. Now that I’ve grown up, and a lot of my ideals are vastly different than those that I grew up with, I’ve struggled with a lot of second-hand guilt about things that I had no control over, even though I was closely involved. This quote has helped me calm my mind a lot, because the person I was then wasn’t me, it was an ideal that I bought into for a while, but that was not me as a person. Casey gets me.

They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions… but before I can live with other folks, I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

I think that this one goes hand in hand with the last quote – we can listen to everyone else and what they think, but at the end of the day, we have to craft our own opinions, we have to choose who we are going to be.

Bravery and strength do not equal goodness.

From Blood and Ash, Jennifer L Armentrout

I think this quote goes hand in hand with “Nice is different than good,” from Into the Woods. I think that our perception of people can warp who they are, and its good to keep in mind that just because someone has a lot of good attributes, doesn’t mean they’re a good person. This mindset has helped me really whittle down who I choose to spend a lot of time with, and my mental health has improved greatly because of it!

Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Neal Gaiman, Coraline

I love this quote, because we all have our own dragons, whatever that may be. Life doesn’t always hand us lemons, sometimes it hands you a massive boulder and then demands that you not only roll it up a hill, you then have to roll it down the other side, and then up the mountain that lays beyond. This quote reminds me that no matter what life throws at us, generally, with enough help, we can beat it.

Hope is a powerful thing. Some say it’s a different breed of magic altogether.

Stephanie Garber, Caraval

I think it’s always a good idea to end with a little bit of hope. Even on dark days, I try to keep my mind on the fact that no matter what – hope is always there. It can transcend so much hurt and pain, and I think that’s what makes it so magical.

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I did it! I narrowed it down to ten! Like I said, these quotes have stuck with me for one reason or another throughout my life, and I hope they stick with you too! I hope that you can use these whenever you need them, just like I did. And if you ever want more, I’ve got a spreadsheet with another 390! What quotes did you choose for your Top Ten Tuesday?

Happy Reading!