Gia Gupta > Gia's Quotes

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“You can't see the future coming--not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I know the world will survive us - and in some ways it will be more alive.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Something that is loved is never lost.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“There is a big difference between a loud voice and a strong voice. The loud voice of a man who has no inner life and is a stranger to his own grief is never a voice for justice; it’s a voice for self-interest, dominance, or vengeance.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“Many successful social movements are driven by the same combination—strong activism and the ability to take pain without passing it on. Anyone who can combine those two finds a voice with moral force.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“Being yourself sounds like a saccharin prescription for how to make it in an aggressive culture but it's not as sweet as it sounds. It means not acting in a way that is false just to fit in. It's expressing your talent, values, and opinions in your style, defending your rights, and never sacrificing yourself respect. That is power.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“To be known without being loved it terrifying

To be loved without being known has no power to change us

But be to be deeply known and deeply loved transforms us

(from Melinda's friend, Killian)”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“For me, love is the effort to help others flourish—and it often begins with lifting up a person’s self-image.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I know my life's meaningful because" - and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued - " because I'm a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sexy means loving someone you do not know.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life