Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“He was raised in the projects of Cleveland and he loved that city with the fierceness of someone who hadn’t been given much to love.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“We drove in silence for a while. Then out of nowhere, Nancy quietly said, 'I'm going to die very soon. Before my twenty-first birthday. I won't live to be twenty-one. I'm never gonna be old. I don't ever want to be ugly and old. I'm an old lady now anyhow. I'm eighty. There's nothing left. I've already lived a whole lifetime. I'm going out. In a blaze of glory.'
Then she was quiet.
Her words just lay there like a bombshell. No one wanted to touch them. She hadn't issued a threat, simply made a flat statement. We all believed her. Even Sid.
[...]
'I honestly can't understand her,' David [Nancy's brother] said as we drove home. 'She's dying. She knows it. Why won't she stop herself?'
'She doesn't want to,' Frank [Nancy's father] ]said sadly. 'She wants to die. She has for a long, long time. It's been her goal.'
'But why?' asked David.
'She hates being alive,' I said. 'She hates her pain. She hates herself. She wants to destroy herself.'
'Isn't there anything you guys can do?' asked David.
'Yes,' I said.
'What?'
'Watch her die.”
― Deborah Spungen, And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder

“Our former selves are never dead. We speak to them, arguing against decisions we know will bring only unhappiness, offering consolation and hope, even though they cannot hear.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“Open yourself to every possibility, for there is nothing your heart can imagine that is not so.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“The beauty isn’t in the jewel itself, but in the way the light shines through it.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“Love comes in so many forms, and pain is no different.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil - rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
― Barack Obama

“A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
― Barack Obama

“She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”
― Natalie Newman, Butterflies and Bullshit

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
― Robert Frost

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“He says, "It's just a hat."
But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.”
― Cecilia Rabess, Everything's Fine

“Love conquers all, except geography, and history, and contemporary sociopolitical reality.”
― Cecilia Rabess, Everything's Fine