Renelle > Renelle's Quotes

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.”
― Christine Stockton, Sluts

“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us.”
― James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

“Even someone like me felt utang na loob, that impossible to quantify sense of indebtedness and gratitude, to the people who’d raised me. But where was that magical line between selfishness and independence? Between my family and myself?”
― Mia P. Manansala, Arsenic and Adobo

“Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind,”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Shunned House

“If I’m ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, “What would a ferret do?” or, “How would a salamander respond to this situation?” Invariably, I find the right answer.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. That must be difficult. Always having to prove that there’s more to you, wanting people to see beneath the surface, to be loved for yourself, and not your stunning body, sparkling eyes or thick, lustrous hair.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.”
― Gail Honeyman

“Wealth is poisonous to the soul, and my parents have been wealthy a very long time—as have most of the guests who will be at this party. Their manners are a mask; you’d do well to remember that.”
― Stuart Turton, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“Nothing like a mask to reveal somebody’s true nature.”
― Stuart Turton, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Mortals may age, but the gods are prisoners of their own infantile whimsies, never capable of change and never knowing what it is to love, because they dare not risk the suffering of loss.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Why did I, Phaedra of Knossos and Athens, put my faith in a man? When I should have seen that what I truly wanted was simply to run away.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“I would not let a man who knew the value of nothing make me doubt the value of myself.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“There was a lot that didn’t feel like my fault at all. But the only thing in life that I had control over is myself and my reactions.”
― Laura Clery, Idiot: Life Stories from the Creator of Help Helen Smash

“I believe that people can change. If they have the willingness, if they see a need within themselves, they can reach down within and change. I hate when people use the phrase “you are who you are” as an excuse to let themselves be less than the person they could be.”
― Laura Clery, Idiot: Life Stories from the Creator of Help Helen Smash

“Greta has a diagnosis, but it doesn’t rule out the fact that she’s right and the rest of us have got it all wrong.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Autism and ADHD and all the other neuropsychiatric functional impairments are not handicaps per se. In many cases, they can be a superpower, that out-of-the-box thinking you so often hear performers, artists and celebrities talk about. Performers like me, for instance. But the complications that can arise because of a diagnosis can definitely be compared to a handicap; a handicap that is created by ignorance, incorrect treatment, discrimination or an inability to provide much-needed societal adaptation.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Someone has to talk openly about a school system where one in four pupils ends up excluded. Pupils who end up without a diploma because special-education private schools that make millions in profit ‘failed’ to hire any teachers. The world’s most profitable failure.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“We experience more, we feel more, we have more and stronger opinions. On social media we debate social issues at a speed and to an extent that makes the 1990s seem like the Middle Ages. Nothing gets to just be, everything has to be taken to extremes. Everything has to be brought to a head. We produce more. We consume more. In fact, whatever it is we do, we do it more. Much more.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“It’s not everyone who has messed it up. There are a few, and to be able to save the planet we have to take up the fight against them and their companies and their money and hold them accountable.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis