Emma Mercer > Emma's Quotes

“She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
― Milan Kundera

“I want to be the one in control of my body, even if that means denying it.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“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'd cut up my heart for you to wear if you wanted it.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“She is passion embodied, a flower of melodrama in eternal bloom.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back–not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“And you’ll smile at this man and wonder if he too, like all those who came before him, will someday be a bittersweet memory, will someday be felled by the same foolish blunder of knowing you a little too well and yet also somehow not enough.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it’s a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I’ve never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colours than ordinary – I remember a few weeks before she died, eating a late supper with her in an Italian restaurant down in the Village, and how she grasped my sleeve at the sudden, almost painful loveliness of a birthday cake with lit candles being carried in procession from the kitchen, faint circle of light wavering in across the dark ceiling and then the cake set down to blaze amidst the family, beatifying an old lady’s face, smiles all round, waiters stepping away with their hands behind their backs – just an ordinary birthday dinner you might see anywhere in an inexpensive downtown restaurant, and I’m sure I wouldn’t even remember it had she not died so soon after, but I thought about it again and again after her death and indeed I’ll probably think about it all my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The pain of losing something precious - be it happiness or material wealth – can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache. Or perhaps what haunts us is that nagging thought that things might have turned out differently. Because without that thought, we would put it down to fate and accept it.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna

“My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.”
― Jane Birkin

“All the love in the world in the world is useless when there is a total lack of understanding.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice