52 Quotes by Dorothy Gilman

What I felt at this moment was black dispair - but no, this was wrong because the color black has vitality , the night is black and has stars and a moon, and mysterious and important events can happen in the darkness. Despair, I decided, was grey: endless, bottomless, without night or day, time, sun or stars.

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves: this was the moment to learn who I was and what I'd become...

evil is, after all, only a deficiency of goodness.

But that is precisely what life is, wouldn’t you agree? Everything is a matter of choice, and when we choose are we not gambling on the unknown and its being a wise choice? And isn’t it free choice that makes individuals of us? We are eternally free to choose ourselves and our futures. I believe myself that life is quite comparable to a map like this, a constant choice of direction and route.

I wasn't offering her pity," Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.

there was no safety anywhere in life, except as illusion

Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.

he appeared to be struggling with something trapped in his throat; it turned out to be a word. "thanks," he said.

from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat: "Set not thy heart on any good or gain, Life means but pleasure, or means but pain; when Time lets slip a little perfect hour, O take it - for it will not come again.