Mel > Mel's Quotes

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“She'd laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“When I, who is called a "weapon" or a "monster", fight a real monster, I can fully realize that I am just a "human".”
― Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 14

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

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