Maddie > Maddie's Quotes

“I couldn't be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“that love was a
distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power
of human greed.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“...perhaps that was the great ill of the world, that those prone to evil were left untouched by guilt to a degree so vast that they might sleep through a storm, while better men, conscience-stained men, lay awake as though that very storm persisted unyieldingly in the furthest reaches of their soul.”
― Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water

“Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“We talk about love like it's an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
― Emily Jane Brontë , Wuthering Heights

“Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“at first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. what we should fear and dread, of course, is that we wont stop loving them, even after they are dead and gone. for i still love you with the whole of my heart. i still love you. and sometimes, my friend, the love that i have and cant give to you, crushed the breast from my chest. soemtimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“words are the medium through which belief systems are manufactured, nurtured, and reinforced, their fanaticism fundamentally could not exist without them.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“I like to watch the sunset. It’s always surprised me how little people grieve when darkness overtakes the light.”
― Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower

“It was funny, she thought, how many relationships one could have with the same man, over the course of a lifetime together.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“The world isn’t that easily turned upside down, Haida replied. It’s people who are turned upside down.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“But the fact is that, even as I know and teach the power of writing, I still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the real world. Maybe it is the nature of books. Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding the author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“My sense is that if I spend more time talking to you than I spend complaining about you, then something wonderful often happens and the enlightenment is mutual. So I don't really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message