Emily Coffee and Commentary > Emily's Quotes

“But then, as anyone knows if she lives as long as I have, people rarely get the denouement they deserve. The world is a random, violent place, and those who expect justice or expect the just to be rewarded are deluded.”
― Marj Charlier, The Rebel Nun

“What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That's all life is, he wants to tell her. It's continuing.”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses

“Grief is nothing but the far brink of love. Love is the sun; grief is the shadow it casts. Love is an opera; grief is its echo. You cannot have one without the other. But if you follow that grief, you will find your way back to love.”
― Nadia Hashimi, Sparks Like Stars

“The way she talks about family—the way everyone here does—is more foreign to Hannah than anything else. She has always had only Mama. To have dozens of people feels like a gift, a gift of love that she never expected. Because she is family, they love her. At the same time, their love is a pressure, a standard she will have to live up to.”
― Eman Quotah, Bride of the Sea: A Novel

“You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--”
― Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun

“How wonderful to simply do things instead of wondering if they are worth doing or discussing whether to do them or being told not to do them or listening to somebody else describe doing them.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun

“I suppose it has been said that art sometimes benefits from a touch of madness”
― Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun

“... it occurred to me that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, crafting stories about ourselves that omit unsavory truths and highlight our invented identities.”
― Marie Benedict, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

“We are more than we think we are. There was always more.”
― Gabriela Garcia, Of Women and Salt: A Novel

“To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It’s written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“I was worst to the one I loved best.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“I cannot think of what it was not to love him. To look at him and realise I had found what I had not known I was hungering for. A hunger so deep, so capable of driving me into the night, that it terrified me.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“The world isn’t ours,’ he said once. ‘It belongs to itself, and that is why it is beautiful.”
― Hannah Kent, The Good People

“Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly's wings.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where there being ends and someone else's starts. With there roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“Do all lovers feel like they're inventing something?”
― Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

“In the solitude, I felt the liberty you speak of. But I also felt your absence.”
― Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

“Perhaps he makes a choice. He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.”
― Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

“She had always thought of her life as a series of submissions to God. What if she has been making her own decisions all along?”
― Padma Viswanathan, The Toss of a Lemon

“When it comes to books...They're like lifelong friends to me; I need to know they're there, even if I don't check in with them on a regular basis.”
― Vendela Vida

“I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death....is the true measure of the Divine within us.”
― Alan Brennert, Moloka'i

“The reason why a person lies is almost always more interesting than the lie itself”
― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

“For truth and death are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them. And truth is like death in that it kills. When I killed I did it with truth not with a knife. That is why they are afraid and in a hurry to execute me. They do not fear my knife. It is my truth that frightens them.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“He has lost his daughters, but he has also lost the memory of losing them. But he has not lost the loss. Pain is as present in his body as his signature is in his hand. He can sign his name perfectly, but he can't print it. W, he tries. But the a is impossible without the cursive tilt, the remembered motion of the letter before. He knows his name but can't see, can't feel, the separate parts, which are only possible from the inertia of his hand. He knows his grief, too, but its source is also lost without its movement. It is a static thing, unrecognizable, disconnected.”
― Emily Ruskovich, Idaho

“You do not laugh at someone who is trying; only at fools who do not give themselves a chance.”
― Sahar Mustafah, The Beauty of Your Face