Lien > Lien's Quotes

“I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.”
― Andrea Gibson

“I listen to myself: this kind of listening is both tedious and courageous.”
― Ellery Akers

“I wanted you to see my heart.”
― Judith Thurman

“Trust your anger. It is a demand for love.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“To read a body is to break that body a little.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“It is December and we must be brave.”
― Natalie Díaz

“To be made of flesh was humiliation.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“What is it like to disregard the body? How do we get around ourselves when we are always in the way? I wonder how badly the serpent wants the loop to end, to consume himself until the flesh is gone. Is that possible? What would that look like, that nothing-space? To complete the autocannibalism of revisiting one’s own trauma, for it to be over?”
― Alice Lesprenance

“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth inordinately and turning it around over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is my way of seeing the end of the world.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means “the dropping of petals.” The world has dropped its petals.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst: Journals

“I confess I meant to grow wings and lose my mind.
I confess that I've forgotten what for.”
― Alice Notley, In the Pines

“I am a ghost of all I don't remember.”
― Christian Wiman

“Growing up, I meant to be a memory.”
― Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home

“To read is to cover one’s face. And to write is to show it.”
― Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home

“I confuse instinct for desire—isn’t bite also touch?”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“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

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― 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

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

“What were you before you met me?"
"I think I was drowning"
"And what are you now?"
"Water”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I'm not a synonym—I'm a proper noun.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath