AJ > AJ's Quotes

“Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.”
― Jean de La Fontaine

“I know how hard it is to find the line between helping someone out, and helping someone in. I know that all suffer and die inside, again and again, from the addiction of one. And I know that sometimes, if love doesn’t harden itself, love doesn’t survive at all.”
― Gregory David Roberts, The Mountain Shadow

“Why do you want to hide it from me?'
'I'm not hiding it. It just isn't yours.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“I was tired of pretending that I was someone else just to get along with people, just for the sake of having friendships.”
― Kurt Cobain

“Attraction isn’t something that only happens once, with one person. It’s part of what drives humans. Our attraction to each other, to art, to food, to entertainment. Attraction is fun. So when you decide to commit to someone, you aren’t saying, ‘I promise I’ll never be attracted to anyone else.’ You’re saying, ‘I promise to commit to you, despite my potential future attraction to other people.’” I look at Clara. “Relationships are hard for that very reason. Your body and your heart don’t stop finding the beauty and the attraction in other people simply because you’ve made a commitment to one person. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re drawn to someone else, it’s up to you to remove yourself from that situation before it becomes too hard to fight.”
― Colleen Hoover, Regretting You

“I realized that if I ever have children, I don't want them to have American childhoods. I don't want them to say 'Hi' to adults I want them to say 'Good morning' and 'Good afternoon'. I don't want them to mumble 'Good' when someone says 'How are you?' to them. Or to raise five fingers when asked how old they are. I want them to say 'I'm fine thank you' and 'I'm five years old'. I don't want a child who feeds on praise and expects a star for effort and talks back to adults in the name of self-expression. Is that terribly conservative?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I am afraid every time I open my computer or look at my phone. I know I shouldn't look. Of course, I shouldn't look. I am afraid of looking but I am afraid no to look too. I am afraid all the time.”
― Louise O'Neill, Asking For It

“I don’t have good processing skills—at least I don’t think I do, because I turn everything into a fucking joke and then bury it in a shallow grave in whatever part of the mind something you never want to think about ever again goes…until its decomposing hand emerges from the dirt on a random Tuesday at 3 a.m. to remind you of that embarrassing thing you thought you’d forgotten.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“People are more gullible and less compassionate than any of us want to believe.”
― Alka Joshi, The Henna Artist

“We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Sometimes men want what they don't have because they don't have it. Even if everyone offered to share, they would only want the share that wasn't theirs.”
― Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni

“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts