Gemma > Gemma's Quotes

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Stop looking at it as an impossible thing and start looking at it as a thing that must be done.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Bedlam Stacks

“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain't never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin. Smelled it when the warden and sergeant cam up on us, the dogs yipping and licking blood from they muzzles. They'd torn his throat out, hamstringed him. Smelled it when the warden told me I'd done good. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I'd led the dog that caught and killed Richie. Smelled it when I finally found his mama after weeks of searching, just so I could tell her Richie was dead and she could look at me with a stone face and shut the door on me. Smelled it when I made it home in the middle of the night, smelled it over the sour smell of the bayou and the salt smell of the sea, smelled it years later when I climbed into bed with Philomene, put my nose in your grandmother's neck, and breathed her in like the scent of her could wash the other away. But it didn't. When Given died, I thought I'd drown in it. Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn't speak. Didn't nothing come close to easing it until you came along.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“There's so many,' Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. 'So many of us,' he says. 'Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Pop's told me some parts of Richie's story over and over again. I've heard the beginning at least too many times to count. There are parts in the middle, about the outlaw hero Kinnie Wagner and the evil Hogjaw, that I've only heard twice. I ain't never heard the end.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“You want sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”
― David Wong, What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“I guess love laughs at history a little.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“I have lived most of my life as a devotee of the philosophy that a man should not see two sevens in one day,”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“I hope I fed you enough. While I'm here. So you carry it with you. Like a camel.' I can hear the smile in her voice, faint. A baring of teeth. 'Maybe that ain't a good way of putting it. Like a well, Jojo. Pull that water up when you need it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I’ve run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can’t make sense of this planet, I’m better off imagining another.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers. I want us to find each other among the forest of writhing and make a deal. Okay, lover. It is just us now. The only way out is through.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“words are the medium through which belief systems are manufactured, nurtured, and reinforced, their fanaticism fundamentally could not exist without them.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish

“The biggest joke in religious studies is that cult + time = religion.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish

“There’s a reason most religions encourage prayer: Language strengthens beliefs.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish