Ami > Ami's Quotes

“Loneliness is an invisible ailment.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman”.

Words are not small things.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn't changed very much since I was a child - a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that's all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I didn’t know what it was like to not know where someone is, someone who’s intrinsically a part of you; I didn’t know how much a person would want to know where that person was and why they weren’t with you. I didn’t get that you could love the people you were with while still agonizing over the unanswered questions about the ones you weren’t with. And the worst part of all of this is that now I get it, and now I would be so sympathetic to them, and I would help them find their bio family because I get it. But I only get it because they’re not here.”
― Suzy Krause, Sorry I Missed You

“I didn’t get that you could love the people you were with while still agonizing over the unanswered questions about the ones you weren’t with.”
― Suzy Krause, Sorry I Missed You

“I think that’s part of being an adult, you know? Your life is just frayed at the edges, and you have whole haunted cities full of people who owe you explanations and apologies. Cities full of ghosts. The end.”
― Suzy Krause, Sorry I Missed You

“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you're thinking but because you're feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can't always control the things you do when you're feeling too much.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I know people hate the romance genre in general, for its predictability, but that's precisely why I love it. Isn't there enough uncertainty in life to seek it in cinema too? For me, there's something magical about that sequence, the promise of a happily ever after, that will never not soothe the deepest of my wounds.”
― Nona Uppal, Fool Me Twice

“What is home:
It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled.
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum.
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes.
It is the cafe where I watched football matches and played-

My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“Parents start out with grand expectations for their kids. But when things don't go as expected, they just want their kids to be ordinary, thinking it's simple. But son, being ordinary is the hardest thing to achieve,”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“When you experience something your whole life, it can be hard to allow yourself to see it, let alone to recognise it as something out of the ordinary. Something wrong. It’s even harder when you’ve been trained, nudged or, in some cases, forced to dismiss these incidents, instead of acknowledging, discussing or reporting them, and when other people have reacted to them as though they are normal. Or funny. Or your fault. Shame and silencing can be very difficult to unpick.”
― Laura Bates, Fix the System, Not the Women

“Normalisation breeds acceptance, not only in society but in ourselves.”
― Laura Bates, Fix the System, Not the Women

“When it came to me, Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“At times I felt like the most visible invisible woman in the world.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“As I grew older, my very existence seemed to be enough to enrage her.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself. Maybe I pitched my tent where the wind blows strongest hoping it would blow my heart clean out of my body.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me