Tina > Tina's Quotes

“Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“Ever since I understood this life was to be mine, I have wanted only for it to continue in its precious routine.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“You're not sure it's ethically possible to justify having children right now, the weather is changing and the inhabitable land is shrinking, Congress has passed a bill that deregulates something, though you've already forgotten what and just how bad it is. Sometimes when you try to think about the future you have panic attacks. Is it fair to give a child what the world has left?”
― Kathryn Harlan, Fruiting Bodies: Stories

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“We’re once again lesbian stereotypes, but they’re stereotypes for a reason. I want to live my life being irrationally hopeful. Loving people and fish and cities with my whole heart.”
― Jake Maia Arlow, How to Excavate a Heart

“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

“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

“That sort of kindness, it gets into your bones. Once you’ve felt it, you can’t help but look for ways to pass the feeling on.”
― Beth O'Leary, The No-Show

“Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“A woman sat alone at her dining table, reading and drinking a cocktail. It’d be such a relief to be older already, unburdened by the pressure to leverage your ever-fleeting beauty for whatever.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“I really, really want to catch him. I want to masticate him with my teeth. I want to barf on him and coat him in my stinging acids. I want to unleash a million babies inside him and burden him with their upbringing.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage: A New York Times Best Book of the Year

“The self,” Blackmore writes, “is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self,” she argues, “only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion—a useful fiction.” She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction.”
― Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

“People will try to make you feel good by saying everyone is beautiful, but what they really mean is written into all those empty beauty campaigns where they only ever show people who still fit the standard or are just a tiny bit deviant from it— just enough to still be acceptable. Maybe they’ve got body hair, but it’s only some peach fuzz and a bit of stubble under their arms. Maybe they’re plus-sized, but they still have the correct chest-to-waist-to-hips ratio. Maybe they’re going makeup-free, but their skin only has a few small imperfections to begin with. Then everybody pats themselves on the back because they’re so inclusive, wow, everyone is beautiful.”
― Jesmeen Kaur Deo, TJ Powar Has Something to Prove

“How tired she must be, I thought, after her rich, full life—a life lived between worlds. She had known the sea’s wild embrace; she had mastered the art of camouflage; she had learned the taste of our skin and the shapes of our faces; she had instinctively remembered how her ancestors wove eggs into chains. She had served as an ambassador for her kind to tens of thousands of aquarium visitors. What an odyssey she had lived.”
― Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

“Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“I'm so grateful now, for every match and every win and every loss and every lesson that I have behind me. It feels so good, right now, to be thirty seven years old. To have figured at least some things out.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how. In other words, we become a window pain. Only somewhere in loss do we find the grace to gaze up & out of ourselves.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“We forget this immensity, it will still be ours, for we wrote such mysteries down: we did the thing others dared not. We collected all the dazzling & dangerous & dreamed aches, scrapped them, though we did not yet have words by which to map them.”
― Amanda Gorman

“Love one another, push the perimeter of this glorious language. Lastly, please show proper courtesy; open not your neighbor's mail.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king. He had thought that was it. Wasn't king the best you could be? Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on. For hadn't Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world—huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile? (Handle with care—everything—even the predators.)

Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn't there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

As for the terrors ahead—for he did not fool himself that they were all behind him—well, you just have to stand up to your fear and not let it squeeze you white. Right, Leslie?

Right.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“My life turned out how I hoped it would, and now I just miss wanting something.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“Maybe things can always get better between people who want to do a good job loving each other. Maybe that’s all it takes.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Fleabag: I have a horrible feeling I'm a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, mannish-looking, morally bankrupt woman who can't even call herself a feminist.
Dad: Well... You get all that from your mother.”
― Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag: The Original Play

“This hurts too much to touch with words.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“To you who talk too much and sing too loud and cry too often and love something in life more than you should.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners