Initial.J > Initial.J's Quotes

“You have to be a little selfish in this world if you want to make it big.”
― Miel Moreland, It Goes Like This

“Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I think it was probably both the coincidence and the beer that made Miralles say at some point that we were going to end up the same, defeated and alone and
punch-drunk in a dead-end city, pissing blood before going into the ring to fight to the death against our own shadows in an empty stadium.”
― Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina

“This was what she had needed. Not forgiveness, not a balm for this strange writhing fury inside her, but the promise of someone to care for--to love--that she could not harm. Even if she had to. Even if she tried.”
― Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne

“Malini wanted to explain that being monstrous wasn't inherent, as Priya seemed to believe it to be. It was something placed upon you: a chain or a poison, bled into you by unkind hands.”
― Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Tales and Poems

“I have no words–alas!–to tell
The loveliness of loving well!”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Tonight I can write the saddest lines
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“So that's who Finnick loves, I think. Not his string of fancy lovers in the Capitol. But a poor, mad girl back home. ”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“And it will be the tragedy of my life that I cannot love you enough to make you mine. That you cannot be loved enough to be anyone’s.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Justice was a god, and Ayla didn't believe in such childish things. She believed in blood.”
― Nina Varela, Crier's War

“Those foxes were wild, though. Wild, frightened, ready to run. Claws and teeth and matted fur. Sometimes that was Ayla. Most times it was not.”
― Nina Varela, Crier's War

“Every day she was becoming a little less human, a little more of a monster.”
― Alicia Jasinska, The Midnight Girls

“You don’t notice the bars of the cage,” Beata said, “unless you start to throw yourself against them. Surviving is a choice too.”
― Alicia Jasinska, The Midnight Girls

“All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.”
― André Breton, Mad Love