Alyssa > Alyssa's Quotes

“My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes. That's the two things to really fight for in life.”
― John Waters

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”
― Freya Stark

“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.”
― David Foster Wallace

“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“some relationships feel like a wildfire-they're powerful and compelling and majestic and dangerous and have the capability to burn you before you even realize you've been consumed.....some relationships feel like a hearth fire-they're solid and stable and cozy and nourishing.”
― Jill Santopolo, The Light We Lost

“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
― Vita Sackville-West

“Sharing one umbrella,
We have to hold each other,
Round the waist to keep together,
You ask me why I'm smiling-
It's because I'm thinking,
I want it to rain forever.”
― Vicki Feaver

“Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude