Milina > Milina's Quotes

“Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“And yet we continue not to do anything to stop it, because the things that are causing it, the things we’re doing that are making it worse – building buildings, taking planes, driving cars, eating meat, buying stuff, having children! – these are the very things that make us us. So we seem to be faced with an impossible dilemma: if we don’t want to be killed by climate change, we have to stop being ourselves. You can see why people aren’t exactly rushing to man the barricades. The thought of addressing it actually seems in some ways worse to us than being killed by it. Or put it another way, the thought of no longer being ourselves is harder for us to get our head around than the thought of being dead.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Greif was a loneliness that felt like a planet.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside-some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“A thousand miles away, justice is being served—but justice, Saffy thinks, is supposed to feel like more. Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“You are a fingerprint. When you open your eyes on the last day of your life, you see your own thumb. In the jaundiced prison light, the lines on the pad of your thumb look like a dried-out riverbed, like sand washed into twirling patterns by water, once there and now gone.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“This was how it always went, wasn't it? All those women who'd come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she'd never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“What it is to be a man,’ she said, ‘and to have days off.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These