Ida > Ida's Quotes

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am made of memories.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“That is — your friend?"
"Philtatos," Achilles replied, sharply. Most beloved.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He smiled, and his face was like the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

“You think I'm a fool?" demanded Harry.
"No, I think you're like James," said Lupin, "who would have regarded it as the height of dishonor to mistrust his friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Rey's face fell, and Leia could see the pain etched there.The girl cared about Ben, and he had disappointed her.”
― Rebecca Roanhorse, Resistance Reborn

“We're staying together," he promised. "You're not getting away from me. Never again.”
― Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena

“Looking up in the sky, I saw the stars were brighter now. They made a pattern I had never noticed before- a gleaming constellation that looked a lot like a girls figure- a girl with a bow, running across the sky. "Let the world honor you, my Huntress. Live forever in the stars.”
― Rick Riordan, The Titan’s Curse

“Percy: Don't I get a kiss for luck? It's kind of a tradition, right?
Annabeth: Come back alive, Seaweed Brain. Then we'll see.”
― Rick Riordan

“By you, I am forever undone.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Anything worth doing always starts as a bad idea.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It's a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. I could have contented myself with saying that I was smitten (and it is true that Thomas knew how to make me weaken), or infatuated (he could conquer, clatter, even bewitch like no one else), or obsessed (he often provoked a mixture of bewilderment and excitement, turning everything upside down), or seduced (once he caught me in his net, there was so no escaping), or taken with (I was stupidly joyful, I could heat up over nothing), or even blinded (anything that embarrassed me, I pushed to the side, minimizing his defects, putting his good qualities on a pedestal), or disturbed (no longer was I ever quite myself), which would have had less positive connotations. I could have explained it away as a mere affection, having a 'crush,' an explanation vague enough to mean anything. But those would just have been words. The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word.

All the same, I wondered if this could be a complete invention. As you already know, I invented stories all the time, with so much authenticity that people usually ended up believing me sometimes even I was no longer able to disentangle the true from the false). Could I have made this story up from scratch? Could I have turned an erotic obsession into a passion? Yes, it's possible.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just disappear? Why can't it just become something else?”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone