Gilded > Gilded's Quotes

“Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty -unless she is wed to something more meaningful -is always superficial”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“If every soldier killed only those who'd personally offended him Peleides, we'd have no wars at all.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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

“But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“...And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or - if death is a journey to another place - that you will not see him again?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“ “I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people, to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole.”     ”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“the things lurking around inside the mind can be just as dangerous as tangible threats.”
― Colleen Hoover, Verity

“Take care of your physical being. Feed it what it needs, not what the conscience tells you it wants. Giving in to cravings of the mind that ultimately hurt the body is like a weak parent giving in to her child. “Oh, you had a bad day? Do you want an entire box of cookies? Okay, sweetie. Eat it. And drink this soda while you’re at it.” Caring for your body is no different from caring for a child. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it sucks, sometimes you just want to give in, but if you do, you’ll pay for the consequences eighteen years down the road.”
― Colleen Hoover, Verity

“An autobiography encouraging the reader to like the author is not a true autobiography. No one is likable from the inside out. One should only walk away from an autobiography with, at best, an uncomfortable distaste for its author. I will deliver.”
― Colleen Hoover, Verity

“writer should never have the audacity to write about themselves unless they’re willing to separate every layer of protection between the author’s soul and their book. The words should come directly from the center of the gut, tearing through flesh and bone as they break free. Ugly and honest and bloody and a little bit terrifying, but completely exposed. An autobiography encouraging the reader to like the author is not a true autobiography. No one is likable from the inside out.”
― Colleen Hoover, Verity

“All humans make mistakes. What determines a person's character aren't the mistakes we make. It's how we take those mistakes and turn them into lessons rather than excuses.”
― Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us

“If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don't ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that's all you need to know.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“He used to tell me, ‘People are strange, Jun. They know nothing lasts forever, but still find time to laugh and cry and get upset, laboring over things and breaking things apart. I know it seems like none of it makes sense. But son, these things make life worth living. So don’t let anything get you down.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs: A powerful and intimate novel about what it means to be a woman in modern Japan

“Even if something happens to us, even if we die and never have to deal with them again, the same thing will happen to someone, somewhere. The same thing. The weak always go through this, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because the strong never go away. That’s why you want to pretend to be like them, isn’t it? You want to join them.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“If you make plenty of money but don't have any kids, you might get called successful. But unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“What I'm really scared of is believing the words society makes me speak are my own.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“People can easily pass judgment on others when they’re protected by their own normality.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“How long do we have to just survive? When will we be able to live rather than just focus on surviving?”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“If you’re always worrying about what other people think, you’ll never get any tougher.”
― Kanae Minato, Confessions

“Happiness is as fragile and fleeting as a bubble soap. Water down the last dregs of happiness and turn them into bubbles to fill the void. It may nothing more than an illusion, but it was still better than the emptiness.”
― Kanae Minato

“It’s much easier to condemn people who do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing yourself.”
― Kanae Minato, Confessions

“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air