quietreader > quietreader's Quotes

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I think you're the opposite of insufferable, I suffer you gladly.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Avery had previously thought love was built on large, visible gestures, but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of ordinary, almost inconsequential, acts of daily devotion—washing the mugs left in the sink before bed, taking the time to run up or downstairs to kiss each other quickly before one left the house, cutting up an extra piece of fruit to share—acts easy to miss, but if ever gone, deeply missed.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“But what they don’t know is this: As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“It is good you have each other, the artist had said, regarding them
seriously as she worked. You never have to explain yourself to sisters.
It was true. Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of
something magic. Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up
of fours. The seasons. The elements. The points on a compass. Four suits in
a pack of cards. Four chambers of a human heart. Bonnie loved being a part
of this mystical number, this perfect symmetry of two sets of two.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Their family had always been good at hellos and goodbyes, moments ending even as they began. It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I believe that everything happens,” she said. “Period. Or full stop, as you would say. That’s it. Things happen and we have to learn to live with them, as long as suicide is off the table, that is. If we can find meaning in them, fine, but even if we can’t, we still have to live with them. The meaning is an afterthought, an anesthesia. Happens is the only word in that statement that’s empirical. The rest is whatever helps you sleep at night.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Could you fall out of love with life if you were never in love with it?”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“We don't have to stop living because we might die.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“It reminds me that as long as the lemon trees grow, hope will never die.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“Bury me before I bury you" I did.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“With all the destruction happening down there, it's so easy to forget the beauty that's up here. The sky is so beautiful after rainfall.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“This is the land of your father, and his father before him. Your history is embedded in this soil. No country in the world will love you as yours does.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“Survivor's skin is a remorse we are cursed to wear forever.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow