This is only my first year in college, but I've quickly learned that there is no greater academic pain than trying to get through the last leg of the spring semester. Between catching up on studying for midterms and finals, trying to enjoy the first few ounces of non-sweater weather, and keeping up the motivation to finish out the year, these can be some pretty trying times on the soul of the average college student. So, to aid in this end-of-the-year endeavor we are all about to go on, I've compiled a list of quotes from classic literature that motivate me when I'm at the breaking point, so I hope they'll do a good service to you, too.
1. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do"
- H. Jackson Brown Jr., "P.S. I Love You"
2. "Get busy living, or get busy dying"
- Stephen King, "Different Seasons"
3. "You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do."
- David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"
4. "People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of."
- Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"
5. "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will."
- Charlotte Brontë, "Jane Eyre"
6. “Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
- Shel Silverstein
7. "So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible."
- Norton Juster, "The Phantom Tollbooth"
8. "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
-Haruki Murakami, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Rubber"
9. "Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life"
- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"
10. "And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."
- Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"
11. "Adversity is like a strong wind. It...tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be."
- Arthur Golden, "Memoirs of a Geisha"
12. “We can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
- George Eliot, "The Mill on the Floss"
13. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
- Dr. Seuss, "Oh, the Places You'll Go!"
14. “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all...The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible... it's yours.”
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
15. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"
16. “I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
- Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"
17. “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
- Herman Melville, "Moby Dick"
