sam > sam's Quotes

“At some point, Jesper realized Kaz was gone.
"Not one for goodbyes, is he?" he muttered.
"He doesn't say goodbye," Inej said. She kept her eyes on the lights of the canal. Somewhere in the garden, a night bird began to sing. "He just lets go.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do and it's a messy one at that.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it's a messy one, at that.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“I have faith, because nature is the very best example of integration. Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Impossible grief is grief that does not adhere to a social contract of justice or human rituals that have existed since the dawn of time.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Sleep, the unreachable finish line.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“members of our support team don’t need to understand every dark corner of our grief in order to provide us support.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love." Or if instead of saying "I am in love" we say "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“the quickest way to make an attractive man ugly was to give him too much to drink.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“The flowers that bloom in spring, the willows, the raindrops and snowflakes became shrines. The mornings ushering in each day, the evenings that daily darken, became shrines.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Work is a guarantee of solitude. Living a solitary life; you are able to let the regular rhythm of long hours of work followed by brief rest carry you through the days, with no time to fear the outer dark beyond the circle of light”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Too often being happy means being passive or playing it safe. There's no skill required in happiness, no strength of character, nothing extraordinary. Its discontent that drives creation the most--passion, desire, defiance. Revolutions don't come from a place of happiness. If anything, I think it's sadness, or discontent at least, that's at the root of everything beautiful.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“It took more than one woman to do things differently. It took a world of them.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“That was the real reason abuse was so common, Isra thought for the first time. Not only because there was no government protection, but because women were raised to believe they were worthless, shameful creatures who deserved to get beaten, who were made to depend on the men who beat them.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“Books were my armor. Everything I'd ever learned growing up, all my thoughts, dreams, goals, experiences, it all came from the books I read. It was like I went around collecting knowledge, plucking it from pages and storing it up, waiting for a chance to use it.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“She knows that no single specific experience led to her loss of language.

Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language worn ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen. Each time she tried to begin a sentence, she could feel her aged heart. Her patched and repatched, dried-up, expressionless heart. The more keenly she felt it, the more fiercely she clasped the words. Until all at once, her grip slackened. The dulled fragments dropped to her feet. The saw-toothed cogs stopped turning. A part of her, the place within her that had been worn down from hard endurance, fell away like flesh, like soft tofu dented by a spoon.”
― Han Kang, Greek Lessons

“What could she say? What sentence would pierce him while leaving her intact? She had built her life so carefully around him. To say something, to do something, to feel something, would be to self-destruct.”
― Lottie Hazell, Piglet

“The Settle House is load bearing. Here is what it bears: Mum's endless sadness, September's fitful wrath, my quiet failure to ever do quite what anyone needs me to do, the seasons, the death of small animals in the scrublands around it, every word that we say in love or anger to one another.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“Yes. I think then, as I have so many times, she is the person I have always wanted to be. I am a shape cut out of the universe, tinged with ever-dying stars- and that she is the creature to fill the gap I leave in the world.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“These old things, they don’t look like much, but they bookmark our lives. They have a silent permanence that people and places do not. Something to carry with us. Always. They were there when no one else was, looking on without judgment when all of these wonderful and terrible things happened to us. And still, they are there. They survive. And somehow, they remember. The worry is, if they’re gone, we are gone, too.”
― Marisha Pessl, Darkly