em > em's Quotes

“All work is prostitution. And all work is love as well”
― Kyōko Okazaki, Pink

“We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Volume 1

“It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

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

“What could I become if I stopped worrying about death, about pain, about anything? If I stopped trying to belong? Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“Father, I am what you made me. I’ve become your daughter after all.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette (skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but she still went on about the weather.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“What am I doing in this eternal winter?”
― Franz Kafka, A Country Doctor

“I have discovered your great wound. You are dying from this flower blooming on your side.”
― Franz Kafka, A Country Doctor

“Ladies. Gentlemen. You have eaten well. You've eaten Gotham's wealth. Its spirit. Your feast is nearly over. From this moment on...none of you are safe.”
― Frank Miller, Batman: Year One

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“What binds me to this earth?
What remembers the dead
and grows toward them?”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“My father the grown-up, my father the child. We are falling into the sunset. Falling into the night sky. Maybe the night sky is kind. Forgiving. We have both been forgiven a thousand times. Being human, always new things to forgive. Forgive me, father. You are already forgiven. Forgive me, daughter. There’s nothing to forgive.”
― Melissa Broder, Death Valley

“Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver