Haylee McManus > Haylee's Quotes

“You are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone’s feelings. You are (…) embarrassed to be alive.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“& so what–if my feathers
are burning. I
never asked for flight.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“My mother said I could be anything I wanted - but I chose to live.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Maybe we pray on our knees because god only listens when we’re this close to the devil.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“When they ask you where you’re from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst— into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won't remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Stupid boy,
You can get lost in every book
but you can never forget yourself
the way god forgets
his hands.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“what becomes of the shepherd / when the sheep are cannibals?”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“How / does anyone / stop / regret / without cutting / off his hands?”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“It's more like the sound
a doe makes
when the arrowhead
replaces the day
with an answer
to the rib's hollowed
hum.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“You want to tell him it's okay that the night is also a grave we climb out of”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chain saw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. & so I learned—that a man in climax was the closest thing
to surrender.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“We live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Tenderness
a thing to be beaten
into.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“To keep
& be kept
[...]
The way light
keeps its shadow
by swallowing it.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Nothing made me happen. I happened.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.'
Because he got hurt?'
No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs