Vic > Vic's Quotes

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“La première fois que je vous ai vue, je me suis fait une piètre opinion de vous. Je vous croyais sans jugeote et sans caractère, incapable de tenir jusqu'au mariage. Ça restera à jamais la plus grosse erreur de ma vie.”
― Christelle Dabos, Les Disparus du Clairdelune

“D’ailleurs, on ne s’aime jamais si bien que quand on se connaît fort mal.”
― Christelle Dabos, Les Fiancés de l'hiver

“after all that waiting they hadn't had very long at all in the end”
― MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It was James who had an ego the size of a lake but a heart to match it.”
― MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes

“But if you have to go, then go. Go if it hurts. Go if it's time. Just go knowing you were loved, that I will never forget you, that you will live in everything Connor and I do. Go knowing I love you purely, Harry, that you were an amazing father. Go knowing I told you all my secrets. Because you were my best friend.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“I loved you so much that I thought you were the meaning of my life....I thought that people were put on earth to find other people, and I was put here to find you. To find you and touch your skin and smell your breath and hear all your thoughts. But I don't want to be meant for someone like you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“I love you so much, sweetheart. So, so much. And it's in part because of things like that. You're an idealist and a romantic, and you have a beautiful soul. And I wish the world was ready to be the way you see it. I wish that the rest of the people on earth with us were capable of living up to your expectations. But they aren't. The world is ugly, and no one wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt about anything. When we lose our work and our reputations, when we lose our friends and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I've lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever I can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“I want to meet you in every place I have loved.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Be selfish," he whispered. "Be brave.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them.

Good. It should.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?”
The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Let them hate, so long as they fear.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life